> +sched-improve-migration-accuracy.patch
> +sched-improve-migration-accuracy-tidy.patch

Bisection shows that this pair of patches raises the boot time;
specifically, the delay from logging of

        "INIT: version 2.86 booting"
        
to
        "                Welcome to Fedora Core"
 
goes from 4s to 4m40s.  From there to 

    "Setting clock  (utc): Sat Nov 25 10:18:11 PST 2006 [  OK  ]"

takes an additional 30s.

A possibly relevant observation: On this particular box, `date` is
always a few seconds behind `hwclock`.  The time difference varies 
from boot to boot, but does not appear to grow over time.