HOWTO fix freebsd clock times in vmware server
From Chaos
Summary
On a regular basis, the clock on my vmware guest (FreeBSD 6.1) would be completely out of skew. For example, if the "real" time was reported as 3:38pm (15:38), the vmhost (upon running the command date), would report a time of 12:13pm.
Fix
The fix was actually fairly easy. Most FreeBSD kernels expect timecounters to tick every 100ms. This will equate to the sysctl kern.clockrate looking something like this:
kern.clockrate: { hz = 1000, tick = 10000, profhz = 66, stathz = 13 }
What it should look like is below, which will allow for more accurate time keeping in the FreeBSD vmhost:
kern.clockrate: { hz = 100, tick = 10000, profhz = 66, stathz = 13 }
To make this change permanent, I added a line to /boot/loader.conf that modifies the kern.hz sysctl:
kern.hz="100"
