Comment 9 for bug 563618

My workaround for this kind of problem has been to store the clock value in
a file during shutdown/reboot, and initially set the time to that value plus
a small amount < reboot latency, before the root filesystem is checked.

This is far from ideal, but does ensure that most user software never sees a
clock rollback. When (if) a network interface is finally brought up, the
clock can be corrected if ntp is installed: this will always produce a
roll-forward, never a roll-back.

Could we tweak /etc/init/hwclock.conf to use this as a fallback?

It's debatable whether this should be enabled by default though: as for
e2fsck, on a "working" system, it may be better to flag up unexpected clock
rollbacks rather than silently patching it up.

Cheers
---Dave