Fedora/CentOS guest clock-date problems

[kjurkic]

Hello

I am encountering a problem with the clock/time/date in a Fedora guest OS. I have run many guest linux distros, but have not before seen this issue.

The clock simply does not advance in the guest. I tried a work-around with a cron job to time-sync with an external ntp server, and set it to run at 5 minute intervals - I am still debugging the script for that.

It seems odd that in the guest I can set the system time using the hwclock function, and manually set the date, but the clock still refuses to "tick" over properly - Its not that the clock stops outright, but it will tick for a few minutes, or even a few hours, continually losing time. I can use ntpdate to call on a remote clock, but again I am having to perform this manually. Its like the guest clock is running at a low percentage of the host clock.

I found another post about Rhel/fedora guest problems, but it was mostly just a link to a troubleshooting guide that didn't have any info that I could find about forcing the system clock.

regards
Ken

[Perryg]

Do you have the guest additions installed (in the guest)?

[kjurkic]

Thanks for response; I was just researching the trick for guest additions install on fedora client. I will try that. Will post back when that is done.

I did try the suggestion for grub kernel arguments:
quiet noapic nolapic nosmp divider=10 nolapic_timer nmi_watchdog=0

but that did not fix the problem.

regards

[kjurkic]

Thanks for response; I was just researching the trick for guest additions install on fedora client. I will try that. Will post back when that is done.

I did try the suggestion for grub kernel arguments:
quiet noapic nolapic nosmp divider=10 nolapic_timer nmi_watchdog=0

but that did not fix the problem.

regards

Figured I'd better update this for any future followers.

Out of frustration, I powered down the VM guest, then powered it up, rather than a reboot. Since then, it has kept time just fine, using only the kernel parameters quoted. I have not even needed to run ntpdate for drift. So far.

To make sure I cover everything: I did not install 'guest additions', but I did do all of the steps required to install it for Fedora/CentOS (eg kernel headers, gcc , etc) That may be what fixed the problem, rather than the power-down.

HTH someone
Ken