vmware timekeeping

[Duane Hill]

On Sat, 07 Jun 2008 09:30:27 -0400
Peter Thoenen <eol1 at yahoo.com> confabulated:

> > I run FreeBSD 7.0 inside VMware Workstation-6.0.4 (ACE Edition) and
> > I don't have to setup anything. The time is the always same as the
> > host
> 
> How long do you keep it up though Odhiambo and how intensive are you 
> using your native OS?  I have a similar setup and while it sync's on 
> boot, I routinely lose 15 minutes a day (I keep it up 24x7).  I think
> it is not so much a bug in VMware as opposed to the host OS running
> slower than it thinks (e.g. maybe a second of OS time is really
> 1.000001 seconds of real time adding up over long periods) if the
> native OS is under moderate to heavy use.

I'm running FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE within Vmware v6.0.4 build 93057 with
the host OS being XP-Home-SP2. I also have two jails running within the
FreeBSD VM.

I have within /boot/loader.conf:
kern.hz="50"

And within root's crontab:
PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin
@reboot ntpdate us.pool.ntp.org

I do not have the Vmware tools loaded. Nor do I have ntpd running. Time
has not been a big issue. The host OS (XP) is used more than average for
the irreplaceable Windoe$ software I have yet to find replacements for
native to FreeBSD.

I just decided to do an ntpdate and here are the results:

plz# ntpdate -b us.pool.ntp.org
 7 Jun 17:04:06 ntpdate[57748]: step time server 208.53.158.34 offset
2.433443 sec

plz# uptime
 4:59PM  up 6 days, 18:47, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

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