My Wurdz

So I have this VMware guest running Windows XP on a x86_64-based CentOS VMware Server 1-based host.

The clock on the guest was gaining - between 5 and 10 seconds every minute or something ridiculous like that.

Finally I figured out what to do after reading this thread (http://communities.vmware.com/thread/51781?start=0&tstart=0).

On the host:

1. Stop cpuspeed with 'service cpuspeed stop'.
2. Turn off cpuspeed at boot time with 'chkconfig --level 12345 cpuspeed off'.
3. Find the real CPU speed with 'cat /proc/cpuinfo'.
4. Then add these lines into the /etc/vmware/config.
   • host.cpukHz = 3000000   (or whatever 'cat /proc/cpuinfo' revealed in step 3 above)
   • host.noTSC = "TRUE"
   • ptsc.noTSC = "TRUE"
5. Make a backup of /etc/vmware/config somewhere really safe because the next time you upgrade the host's linux kernel, /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl will have to be run and it will overwrite your customizations in /etc/vmware/config.
6. Reboot the host.