Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:
atime is a legacy ass-backwards default That no one dared touching it so far does not make it less stupid We're making more user-impacting changes with less cause every release
Let's just disable atime asap so more testers check it before F8, and forget about it
Going through the LKML thread on http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148 I learnt that Ubuntu has already turned it off, and in principle both Alan Cox and Ingo Molnar want it to be that way for Fedora 8 too.
Ubuntu doesn't have a decade+ history of putting user-controled settings under /etc/sysconfig and providing python scripts named redhat-config-xxx or system-config-xxx to manage them. Their style is to pretend they know more than you do about how your machine should be configured. Even if they are right, there is something to be said for consistency.