Mandriva 2008 & VMWare Clock Problem [solved]

[Phil Edwards]

Posting this here in the hope that it may be of some help to others...

 

I've done a fresh install of Mandriva 2008 on my Dell Latitude D800 laptop. I also run VMWare workstation 6.02 with XP Pro as a guest instance. The problems I had following the install were:

 

1. CPU clock speed was being throttled back to 600 MHz and would not go back up again to 1700MHz afterwards. If the CPU got throttled to a higher value, say 1000MHz, it would happily speed up again when the load increased, but as soon as it hit the 600 MHz minimum, it got stuck there.

 

2. Due to problem (1) above, the clock on my VMWare guest instance was going completely nuts every time the CPU speed was throttled back. It would vary from too slow to too fast, but would always be out by several tens of minutes in either direction.

 

I wasn't hugely surprised, because Mandriva 2008 is not currently one of the host OS versions which is officially supported by VMWare WS6, but I found a way to resolve both issues.

 

I fixed problem (1) by editing /etc/sysconfig/cpufreq and uncommenting the following lines:

 

GOVERNOR=performance
MIN_FREQ=1700000
MAX_FREQ=1700000

 

I fixed problem (2) by editing /etc/vmware/config and adding the following lines:

 

host.cpukHz = 1700000
host.noTSC = TRUE
ptsc.noTSC = TRUE

 

My CPU now stays permanently pegged at its maximum speed, which is nice, and the clock in my WinXP guest instance keeps perfect time again. Peace and love, as they say... :D

Edited April 9, 2008 by Phil Edwards

[scarecrow]

Another thing you should do to avoid hardlocks, if you are using dual CPU configurations at your guest OSes, is disabling the host kernel's tickless timer ( nohz=off at the grub commandline ).

Notice too that currently VMWare has serious issues with the keyboard focus at systems with xorg 7.3 - but since Mandy 2008.0 still has 7.2 this isn't something you should worry about - yet!

Edited March 17, 2008 by scarecrow