Thursday, August 23, 2007

SOLVED: Fedora or Redhat clock drift under VMWare server

I stumbled upon an easy solution to clock skew or drift when, at least in my case, Redhat EL or Fedora 7 are a vmware server guest OS under Windows Server 2003.

Edit the /etc/grub.conf file and add to the end of the line that begins with "kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22.1-41.fc7.img ..."

These are the boot options for the kernel.

At the end of the above line add clock=pmtmr to the end of that line. Your kernel line in grub.conf should look similar to the following:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22.1-41.fc7 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet clock=pmtmr

Reboot and you clock drift should cease. Make sure to make a copy of the original just in case you cannot boot Linux. You can use either an alternate boot option or a rescue disk to recover to the original file.

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