[Xastir] VMWare Network issue

[Tom Russo]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 01:10:16PM -0400, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <mckeehan at mckeehan.homeip.net> flavor, containing:
> Hahaha, I hear you, but actually, I've not had many problems with Vista. Once
> I realized this problem was a firewall issue, it was easy to adjust the
> Windows firewall to get around the problem.
> 
> However, once I got the VMWare stuff up and running (BTW, the Xastir install
> worked just fine once I corrected the firewall issue) I noticed a small
> problem.
> 
> The clock on the guest OS was moving along at a rather quick step (1 minute
> per second or there about). None of the tricks that I found from Google
> corrected this, so I bailed on the VMWare install and reverted to the Cygwin
> install.

There are several reasons this can happen --- usually it's due to a confusion
by vmware about what the host's clock speed is.  You could see that in action
if you look at the "vmware.log" file in your virtual machine's folder --- it
probably reports a guessed clock speed that is vastly slower than your real
clock speed, and so it acts like it's running on crack.

I found several installs where that "guest clock on crack" thing showed up,
and had posted some solutions to the vmware forums on vmware.com (you 
used to be able to find those posts by searching the forums for the phrase "on 
crack") --- unfortunately it appears that those forums are gone (or at least so
carefully hidden that I can't find them).  Their knowledge base is wretched, 
as I've never been able to find anything helpful there, even when there was
helpful stuff in the base (the search engine rots).

There's a file on linux called /etc/vmware/config that one can edit to force
vmware to use a host clock speed that is correct, instead of guessing 
incorrectly.  It most often guesses incorrectly if you've got any kind of
laptop that can manipulate its clock speed for power savings.  In my case,
the manifestation of that was almost always a glacial behavior of the guest,
with one second of guest time passing in about 10 seconds of real time, but
after upgrading to Gutsy and VMware 6.0 it flipped to what you're seeing.

My solution on my laptop is to do the following:

  1) When starting vmware, turn off the host's ability to throttle the 
     processor so the CPU is always running at full speed.  This is very OS 
     dependent, not sure how you'd do it on Vista.  On linux it's done with
     cpufreq-set by specifying the "performance" governor instead of the
     "ondemand" governor.  This might not be necessary for you, though ---
     the issue this fixes is that on some systems the governor is not smart
     enough to detect vmware guest activity as activity requiring speeding up
     the processor.  
  1a) On my system (which is an oldish pentium-m processor),
      I have an additional step that changes a system parameter so it can't
      put the pentium-m into wait states or something like that.  You almost
      certainly don't need that, either.

  2) Have the following line in /etc/vmware/config:
     host.cpukHZ = 1729072
     (that's the actual speed of my processor reported on boot, expressed in
      kilohertz, yours will certainly be different)
     This one might very well be exactly the one you need.

By doing these things (the last is a one-time deal, the first two are done
every time I start VMware in a startup script), my guest runs at the correct 
speed.  Without the last step, I see exactly what you see.

I am not sure what file you'd tweak on Vista's vmware install, but there must 
be a config file similar to /etc/vmware/config there somewhere.  It's the file 
that contains definitions like the host address foryour "vmnet1" virtual 
ethernet, the product name, and path names to various bits of vmware.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
 "It's so simple to be wise: just think of something stupid to say and
  then don't say it."  --- Sam Levinson