Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 64 bit stalls on VMware

Stumbled upon another issue when running Ubuntu on wmvare today, it seems that a TSC clock bug in the 2.6.24 kernel. Short it goes out of sync when running with more than one cpu / vcpu.

Solutions:

• Go down to only one vCpu on the virtual machine. (You properly don’t even notice)

or

• Use another clocksource in the kernel.

its quite easy to change to clocksource on the kernel to e.g. acpi, just add the following line to /boot/grub/menu.lst just below the line “# kopt=root=UUID=fc7b5f8f-c236-4296-9e79-be6e96900eb9 ro”

clocksource=acpi_pm

Please remember that this only applies to esx 3.0 and Ubuntu 8.04 with 2.6.24 kernel.

/Renzo