CentOS virt - Aug 2008 - VMware Server clock woes (running too fast)

I'm running VMware Server 1.0.6 on a CentOS 5.2 host and am having some
clock difficulties.

Host OS is x86_64 running on 1.9 GHz AMD Sempron, nVidia chipset.

Guest OS's are 32-bit FreeBSD (clock works fine after disabling ACPI,
setting the clock source to the PIT, and running the guest tools), WinXP
(unknown clock status), and i686 CentOS 5.2 (here is the problem).

I've tried pretty much everything to try to fix it.  I have host.cpukHz,
host.noTSC, and ptsc.noTSC set in /etc/vmware/config.  I've booted my
kernel with noapic, nosmp, noacpi, divider=10.  Sadly, I hit the
clocksource=pit with divider bug, so I have not been able to boot with
both that and divider=10, although clocksource=pit without a divider
also does not work.  I even built a custom kernel with SMP and APIC
disabled, CPU_HZ=100, and booted with clocksource=pit noacpi, and it
also gains time.

Could anyone provide a recommendation as to what I can do to fix this problem?

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On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 5:55 PM, Michael Ekstrand <michael at elehack.net>
wrote:
> I'm running VMware Server 1.0.6 on a CentOS 5.2 host and am having some
> clock difficulties.
>
> Host OS is x86_64 running on 1.9 GHz AMD Sempron, nVidia chipset.
>
> Guest OS's are 32-bit FreeBSD (clock works fine after disabling ACPI,
> setting the clock source to the PIT, and running the guest tools), WinXP
> (unknown clock status), and i686 CentOS 5.2 (here is the problem).
>
> I've tried pretty much everything to try to fix it.  I have
host.cpukHz,
> host.noTSC, and ptsc.noTSC set in /etc/vmware/config.  I've booted my
> kernel with noapic, nosmp, noacpi, divider=10.  Sadly, I hit the
> clocksource=pit with divider bug, so I have not been able to boot with
> both that and divider=10, although clocksource=pit without a divider
> also does not work.  I even built a custom kernel with SMP and APIC
> disabled, CPU_HZ=100, and booted with clocksource=pit noacpi, and it
> also gains time.
>
> Could anyone provide a recommendation as to what I can do to fix this
problem?
I understand you built a 100Hz kernel, but *just in case*, you might
want to try CentOS-supplied 100Hz kernel (kernel-vm) available from:

http://people.centos.org/tru/kernel-vm/

Also, enable time sync with host if that has not been done.

Akemi