Description of problem: There could be excellent reasons to mount file systems with 'relatime' options. After /etc/fstab edits and restarting the system everything looks just fine. $ mount | grep relatime /dev/sda3 on / type ext3 (rw,relatime) ..... (and so on as it was supposed to be). The catch is that after a kernel update a system does not boot. The culprit is mkinitrd which is producing in 'init' script on a boot image a command like that: mkrootdev -t ext3 -o relatime,ro LABEL=/ and 'mkrootdev' from nash fails on this. Simply ignoring options which it does not understand looks like the simplest solution here. The above can be worked around using an undocumented option '--rootopts=defaults' to mkinitrd when generating a replacement boot image. Unfortunately kernel package scripts are not doing that. Another possibility is to hack /sbin/mkinitrd and force it to always use "defaults" and not bother with /etc/fstab. Trivial but prone to overwrite on updates. The best likely would be to fix nash. Are there really any good reasons to pass options to mkrootdev? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): mkinitrd-6.0.19-4.fc8 How reproducible: always
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=296361#c4 According to this, relatime is now the default, so you don't really need relatime support in nash. Bug #296361 remains open though because it is probably a good idea to fix nash anyway for safety's sake. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 296361 ***