On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 04:22:45PM +0300, Surbhi Palande wrote:

This has another advantage, that it rightfully does not let you
update the access time when the F.S is frozen (touch_atime called
from a read path when the F.S is frozen) Otherwise we also need to
fix this path.

In most filesystens atime updates aren't transactional.  They just
get written into inode->i_atime, and at some later point when the
VFS tries to clean the inode it gets writtent back, either through
a transaction or not.