As evidenced by this thread, the partitioning tool (on at least the GNOME .iso
) adds noatime
as a mount option for the swap partition ─ as well as for swap files ─ in /etc/fstab
.
A swap partition doesn’t have any filesystem on it, and therefore adding noatime
to the mount options is nonsensical, because if there isn’t any filesystem, then there also aren’t any inodes, and thus no ctime
, mtime
or atime
fields to be updated.
The same holds true in the event of a swap file. The swap file itself is located by the kernel by way of the filesystem layer, but once mounted, the contents of the swap file are just raw drive blocks, without any filesystem structures or inodes.
The swap file itself does have ctime
, mtime
and atime
fields because it is a file and thus it has an inode, but in that case, the noatime
mount option should be set on the filesystem containing the swap file, not in the mount options for the swap file itself.