One thing I would like to note is that in machines which don't have a hardware clock, I had problems starting bind and unbound, because the date was back to 1970 in each boot, so the root dns key was not yet valid and there were no valid dns resolvers to update time by ntp. I had to hardcode some ntp servers IP addresses to perform the ntp queries at boot time.
This was using the OpenWrt distro in a mips router, I don't know if we can face this kind of problem in ARM machines. I guess all x86 have hardware clock, doesn't they?
Regards, Juan.