From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) No matter if using the installed kernel, or upgrading via redhat update, or compiling 2.4.x, you get the user and group quotas turned on message even if it wasn't compiled into the kernel. You also get the message even if it was and no quota set up. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.reboot 2. 3. Actual Results: Feb 11 22:55:23 linux rc.sysinit: Turning on user and group quotas for local filesystems: succeeded Expected Results: If quotas aren't used, you shouldn't see any quota messages unless configured to do so. I don't use quotas on my machine, and haven't configured anything to use them, so therefore shouldn't see any messages about quotas. If quota is compiled to the kernel, but not used, maybe you shouldn't see the message, or see it but changed to not being used or something.
Changing it to check for whether they are enabled requires parsing the fstab to find all the filesystems, and then look at each filesystem's contents to determine if quotas are enabled for that particular filesystem. It's faster/more efficient to just leave it the way it is; it doesn't actually harm anything.