Time sync woes

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Windows hosts.
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ras
Posts: 15
Joined: 5. Nov 2016, 03:45

Time sync woes

Post by ras »

Latest VirtualBox (5.2.12 r122591) on Windows 10 64-bit host; guest is also Windows 10 64-bit, latest Guest Additions (also 5.2.12 r122591) installed.

The guest is running an app that needs close time synchronization; in particular, it goes crazy when time goes backwards. The guest consistently falls further and further behind, and for some reason, the guest addition keeps adjusting time further backwards - if I display a digital clock showing seconds, I can watch it tick 28, 29, 30, 31, 29, 30, 31, 32, etc. (Again, this is happening when the guest time is already significantly behind the host time - by as much as a couple minutes.) Then the guest will suddenly speed up - perhaps not quite catching up to host time, but getting to within a few seconds - and then start gradually moving backwards again.

I've tried a lot of the settings described in 9.14.3 in the manual without success. In particular, --timesync-set-threshold, which is described as: "The absolute drift threshold, given as milliseconds where to start setting the time instead of trying to smoothly adjust it". That language is a little hard to understand, but I take it to mean that if you set it to 1000, it should perform a hard sync whenever the time is off by more than a second (rather than trying to smoothly adjust the time). But this doesn't work (or at least doesn't do what I think it's supposed to do); the time can still get off by many minutes. Adjusting --timesync-set-threshold actually seemed to make the clock drift substantially worse, not better; I've gotten rid of that setting.

I've read every thread I can find on this forum related to time sync issues. Any suggestions?
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logfiles.zip
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ras
Posts: 15
Joined: 5. Nov 2016, 03:45

Re: Time sync woes

Post by ras »

In the previous log set VBoxHardening.log was huge, with over 100,000 lines that looked like:

Code: Select all

2a98.17f8: supR3HardenedMonitor_LdrLoadDll: returns rcNt=0x0 hMod=00007fff5bd20000 'C:\WINDOWS\System32\OPENGL32.dll'
(Initial address varied.) On a hunch I disabled 3D Acceleration; I still get that message, but now it's thousands of times, not hundreds of thousands. This didn't solve my sync problems, though.

I'm attaching a new log set. In VBox.log I get a lot of lines that look like this:

Code: Select all

02:11:12.697980 TM: Giving up catch-up attempt at a 60 000 039 559 ns lag; new total: 1 740 006 222 741 ns
02:17:15.128960 TM: Giving up catch-up attempt at a 60 000 316 692 ns lag; new total: 1 800 006 539 433 ns
02:23:02.720328 TM: Giving up catch-up attempt at a 60 000 059 468 ns lag; new total: 1 860 006 598 901 ns
02:28:23.508916 TM: Giving up catch-up attempt at a 60 000 013 036 ns lag; new total: 1 920 006 611 937 ns
02:33:00.506287 TM: Giving up catch-up attempt at a 60 000 286 207 ns lag; new total: 1 980 006 898 144 ns
Is that related to time syncing?
ras
Posts: 15
Joined: 5. Nov 2016, 03:45

Re: Time sync woes

Post by ras »

Oops - here are the new logs
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ras
Posts: 15
Joined: 5. Nov 2016, 03:45

Re: Time sync woes

Post by ras »

No ideas at all on this? The crickets are deafening.
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