If, like Tim Connors, you’re puzzled about why the kernel isn’t honouring your “norelatime” or “atime” options and is keeping the default “relatime” mount option then be reassured it’s not a kernel bug, it’s a bug in the mount command instead. 😉

Basically to enable the POSIX “atime” behaviour again (for those few cases which require it) the mount command needs to pass the MS_STRICTATIME option to the mount(2) syscall, but it appears that the version in the mainstream distributions is too old to do this. There is already a Fedora bug to backport this, and Tim has just reassigned his existing one to mount.