Re: Timekeeping in stable/9

[Joe Holden]

Ronald Klop wrote:
On Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:11:51 +0100, Martin Sugioarto 
<mar...@sugioarto.com> wrote:

Am Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:20:51 +0100
schrieb "Ronald Klop" <ronald-freeb...@klop.yi.org>:

Hi,

As I understand it.
Host: FreeBSD 9
Guest: WinXP

Which one has troubles with its clock? The host or the guest or both?

Hi,

only inside VirtualBox, I think it's only an application problem and
my emails would be probably better addressed to ports@. ONLY the guest
is affected when host is loaded.

I noticed additionally:

You get better results with a desync'ed clock in the guest system, when
you start "openssl speed -multi 20" or similar. Within a few seconds the
clock gets a 20 seconds difference.

How many CPU's did you assign to the guest?
Did you install virtualbox guest additions to the guest?

Here a few details (guest additions are installed):

Memory size:     1600MB
Page Fusion:     off
VRAM size:       256MB
HPET:            on/off (tried both settings)
Chipset:         piix3
Firmware:        BIOS
Number of CPUs:  1
Synthetic Cpu:   off
CPUID overrides: None
[...]
ACPI:            on
IOAPIC:          off
PAE:             on
Time offset:     0 ms
RTC:             local time
Hardw. virt.ext: on
Hardw. virt.ext exclusive: on
Nested Paging:   on
Large Pages:     on
VT-x VPID:       on
[...]
3D Acceleration: off
2D Video Acceleration: on

Do you run NTP on the guest XP also? If yes, turn it off.

Windows XP default installation (synch'ed to time.windows.com).
Switching this off, does not have any influence. I think MS-Windows
does not do continuous synchronization, only at system start, I guess.

VBox guest additions can sync the guest clock with the host.

I'll try to deinstall them. But I somehow like my shared folder.

BTW: My experience with VBox is that it is nice for hobby stuff, but
not for heavy load server stuff. VMWare does a better job there.

Yes. I know. Still VirtualBox ist nice and cheap solution.

--
Martin

BTW: I used VBox on Linux at work. Same problems. Different problems 
come and go with different versions of Linux in combination with 
different versions of VirtualBox. Using VmWare ESXI solved it. If you 
search a lot on the vmware website you will find a free version.

Ronald.
In the extreme case I have here, the host isn't taxed at all, cpu, disk 
i/o and such are almost idle but the time is skewed dramatically regardless.

For reference the settings I have are:

4 VCPUS (4 physical cores)
1GB ram
ICH9, SAS controller

If I toggle the sysctl in my previous post the problem goes way, and 
doesn't return even if the sysctl is changed back... until a reboot of 
course.  None of the pre-9 guests (there are quite a few spread across a 
couple of identical machines) exhibit the behaviour, nor does this 
particular one when reverted to a pre-upgrade snapshot, so in this case 
it is certainly not the hardware but whatever is used to keep track of 
the "ticks" (terminology probably incorrect)

Thanks,
J
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