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mjmsmith
Contributor
Contributor

"host clock rate change request" log entries

I'm running Fedora 7 in VMware 1.1 on a MacBook Pro running OS X 10.5. The "host clock rate change request" message is being written to system.log about 10 times a minute. Is there a way I can stop this?

thx

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mjmsmith
Contributor
Contributor

Anybody have a suggestion on this problem? My system.log files are averaging over 10,000 lines per day, and more than 9,000 of that is this VMware message. It's kind of ridiculous.

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lostchicken
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Contributor

Might try disabling power management from your guest OS. The clock rate change requests come from something trying to slow the CPUs to save power, could be the host, could be the guest. Worth a shot.

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mjmsmith
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for the suggestion, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

Can someone from VMware offer any insight into this? It's still writing to my system log file literally every few seconds.

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ylon
Contributor
Contributor

Interestingly enough I'll echo this request for support. I'm seeing the same situation, however I'm running VMware Server on Linux (SME Server 7.2 which is based on RHEL 4). I am getting a near endless feed of "server kernel: /dev/vmmon[####]: host clock rate change request ### -> ###"

Ubuntu Server is my guest OS. Please advise ASAP to both of our inquiries.

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mjmsmith
Contributor
Contributor

Any chance someone from VMware could offer a suggestion on this?

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

If you're plugged into AC power, do you still see the messages? What if you're not but disable power management on the host?

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TimMann
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

The message is not related to power management -- nothing is asking to change the CPU frequency; rather, it's asking to change the timer interrupt frequency.

We should really nuke this message. In the meantime, on Linux hosts you can stop the pain by changing your /etc/syslog.conf configuration to discard kern.debug messages instead of writing them to the log file. Some distros do that by default, but evidently others want to catch them. If you have a kern.debug or kern.* entry in your syslog.conf, changing that to kern.info will drop the debug messages but still keep everything of higher priority. If you also have (for example) a *.=debug to catch all debug messages, you can exclude the kernel ones by changing that to *.=debug;kern.!=debug. See "man 5 syslog.conf" for all the gory details.

Note that throwing debug messages on the floor shouldn't be a problem unless you're planning to debug the kernel. Kernel debug messages aren't high priority messages telling you about bugs; they're lowest-priority messages that are typically only useful to kernel hackers.

I don't know if there's a way to discard the messages on Mac hosts... anyone?

mjmsmith
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Contributor

The syslog.conf change also seems to work on OS X. Thanks!

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maxn
Contributor
Contributor

Really? I tried that on OS X 10.4 to no avail. What was the line in /etc/syslog.conf that you used? This is what I have now:

*.err;kern.info;auth.notice;authpriv,remoteauth,install.none;mail.crit /dev/console

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mjmsmith
Contributor
Contributor

It worked for me on Leopard, dunno about Tiger. I changed two lines; here are the commented out original lines and changes:

#.err;kern.;auth.notice;authpriv,remoteauth,install.none;mail.crit /dev/console

#*.notice;authpriv,remoteauth,ftp,install.none;kern.debug;mail.crit /var/log/system.log

*.err;kern.info;auth.notice;authpriv,remoteauth,install.none;mail.crit /dev/console

*.notice;authpriv,remoteauth,ftp,install.none;kern.info;mail.crit /var/log/system.log

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maxn
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks! You're so right. I was dumb and only managed to change the

/dev/console line, not also the /var/log/system.log entry.

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 2:23 PM, mjmsmith <communities-emailer@vmware.com

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