Time Clock Stops in FreeBSD 9.0 guest running under ESXi 5.0

[Steve Wills]

On 03/10/12 08:56, Adam Strohl wrote:
> On 3/10/2012 17:10, Bjoern A. Zeeb wrote:
>> On 10. Mar 2012, at 08:07 , Adam Strohl wrote:
>>
>>> I've now seen this on two different VMs on two different ESXi servers
>>> (Xeon based hosts but different hardware otherwise and at different
>>> facilities):
>>>
>>> Everything runs fine for weeks then (seemingly) suddenly/randomly the
>>> clock STOPS.
>>
>> Apart from the ntp vs. openvm-tools thing, do you have an idea what
>> "for weeks"  means in more detail?  Can you check based on last/daily
>> mails/.. how many days it was since last reboot to a) see if it's
>> close to a integer wrap-around or b) to give anyone who wants to
>> reproduce this maybe a clue on how long they'll have to wait?  For
>> that matter, is it a stock 9.0 or your own kernel?  What other modules
>> are loaded?
> 
> Uptime was 31 days on the first incident / server (occurred 5 days ago)
> Uptime was 4 days on the second incident / server (occurred last night)
> 

I've experienced something similar once or twice with ESXi 5.0. The
second time it happened, I found that kern.timecounter.tc.HPET.counter
stopped changing. I was told on IRC that this indicated a "hardware"
problem, which I took to indicate a possible bug in ESXi. I haven't
upgraded to ESXi 5.0 Update 1 yet to see if that changes anything.
Rebooting of course fixed it, it has been a while since this happened
and it hasn't happened again since so I haven't pursued it. Just another
data point, hope it hopes.

Steve