is setting /boot or / to have noatime dangerous?

[marko]

I like to reduce disk writing a bit by using the "noatime" option
in /etc/fstab. But recently I had a bit of trouble on my laptop
where it just would not boot properly. I had added noatime
to / and /boot in /etc/fstab and each boot attempt would get
tons of 'read-only filesystem' warnings ending in a hang. I then
used a live cd to edit the /etc/fstab and could then reboot
after removing the noatimes. Since noatime doesn't make
a partition readonly but just stops the constant setting
of the look at time for files, I don't understand why this
fix worked. So is there a problem with using noatime with
the boot partition?

Mark

[brentley]

There should be no problem with noatime on /boot (or / for that matter). About the only thing you need to watch out for is that tmpwatch uses atime to figure out which files to delete from /tmp.... if 'noatime' is used on that partition, then files not *modified* during the last 10 days will be deleted.