Linux clock running slow under VMWare
posted in Technology |I’ve been noticing that the timestamps on posts here have been a bit wacky, and that the clock on this server was getting off. This server is currently running Fedora Core 6 on top of VMWare, and the clock kept slipping behind. After being puzzled about this for a few days I finally got around to searching for the issue and found an answer-
According to KB article son the VMware site, the Linux runs its clock off counting an interupt (rather than just reading the value from the RTC I guess?) With virtualization some of those interupts can get missed or else the speed at which the virtual machine sends the interupts can be configured differently from what the kernel expects.
The solution was to add this to my GRUB configuration file-
clock=pit nosmp noapic nolapic
So the kernel definitions in /boot/grub/grub.conf look like-
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-28.9 ro root=/dev/hda2 clock=pit nosmp noapic nolapic
As far as I can tell its all fixed now.