time goes slow in VmWare

[Adrian Chadd]

This is the most often asked question with virtualisation of PC
hardware. The question was finally answered, but here's the reasoning:

* The operating system expects the clock/timer hardware to be consistent
* The timer hardware in a VM isn't that consistent as the
virtualisation environment is actively scheduling available timeslices
to VMs; so
* timers (and, therefore, your clock) gets screwed up.

The solution is to install the VMware or VirtualPC supplied drivers
for your environment. They'll include, amongst other things, fixes for
the RTC and timer drivers which will fix your clock skew issues (and
if you've noticed, things like "sleep" acting oddly.)

2c,


Adrian

-- 
Adrian Chadd - adrian at freebsd.org