[fedora-arm] Dealing with lack of a real time clock

[Robert Moskowitz]

A lot of the arm boards, or so I have been told, are like mine; no rtc.

This is causing a lot of interesting problems with boot up until ntp can 
set the time (or is it ntpdate?).

So I was thing of how to 'fix' this.  Over on the Redsleeve list a 
fellow that is dealing with this on his RasberryPi noted: 
http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Nortc

This might be one solution if someone took it on (I have no skills in 
coding or building packages).

But I was thinking of a scripted approach.

First you need a file that has date/time in a format that it can be 
piped into the date command like:

date < /etc/fixtime

The image build process would put the build date into this file for 
starters.  At firstboot, if the time is near zero (some seconds having 
passed since poweron), a few things happen:

The fixtime script is run to set the time to the image build date/time.
The fixtime script is set to run at every boot as one of the first 
processes.
A cron job is enabled (hourly or dayly) to update /etc/fixtime so the 
next boot will have a more current time.

I probably have the skills to write a fixtime script and a cron fixtime 
update, but I don't know how to alter the boot process.  But I think 
that such a process is needed to address all the little oddities that 
come up when the system boots with time ZERO.  And think about desktop 
setup where only after the user logs into wireless can ntp get the time.

Comments?