Probably be doing this anyway? but..

The first thing I have to do on a new image (other than set root password) is to get ntpd running to get the current date/time as no battery rtc. It is bad enough that all the boot messages have the wrong time, but at least to get the time as soon as possible.

BTW, I suggested some time ago on the Fedora-arm list a service that regularly (perhaps every 5 min) writes the current date/time to a file. At boot time, a script reads this and sets the date/time so that the boot messages (and if network has problems) is closer to the actual time rather than reporting it is 1970.