severe time drift

Forum: DSL Embedded
Topic: severe time drift
started by: robertakit

Posted by robertakit on Dec. 20 2007,01:35

It seems that, under certain conditions, time under the DSL running under QEMU on Windows Vista drifts quite a lot -- about 2 minutes every 10 minutes.

I think the problem only happens when I undock my laptop, but I'm not sure. I "rebooted" (restarted) DSL and it seems better now ('though I added a cron job which runs every 10 mins to do gettime.lua just to be paranoid).

Has anyone else encountered this? Is there a way to kick QEMU so time is better synchronized? I would prefer not having to reboot DSL every time I undock.

Posted by john.martzouco on Dec. 20 2007,12:07

Hi robertakit,

I run DSL 4.1 under virtualization on a couple of machines regularly. I can confirm that there is a time drift in this case. I synched my clock with gettime.lua at 6.30 this morning and when I checked at 7.00, it was 1.5 minutes behind. This is in accord with the 3m/h drift that you've mentioned.

I'm running my virtualizations under MS Virtual PC 2007, Windows XP SP2. I know that you are using QEMU. I guess this means that it's a virtualization issue. I wonder how other OS will do in this case?

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Dec. 21 2007,00:34

Are you using the xp compatibility layer with qemu? If not, I have read that you should use it.
I haven't experienced problems with vmware though.