pesquisando rootflags noatime
traz este post de 2003 por Andrew Morton, talvez ainda se aplique.
While testing something, I tried to boot with 'rootflags=noatime', and found the system wouldn't boot, as ext3, ext2, and reiserfs all failed to recognize the option. Looking at the code in fs/ext3/super.c:parse_options() and init/do_mounts.c:root_data_setup(), it appears to be impossible to set any of the filesystem-independent flags via rootflags, which explains the special-case code for the 'ro' and 'rw' flags. However, there doesn't seem to be any way to pass nodev, noatime, nodiratime, or any of the other flags. (And yes, all 3 of those make sense in my environment - it's a laptop and I don't need atime, and I use devfs so nodev on the root makes sense too).
As opções independentes de fs são analisadas no espaço do usuário pelo mount (8), e são passados para o kernel como bits individuais em um argumento 'flags'.