/dev/vmon: host clock rate change request syslog messages

On my VMWare host system I was seeing frequent (2-3/minute) syslog messages like the following that was making my syslog really hard to view:

/dev/vmmon[12315]: host clock rate change request 26 -> 30

Searching around on the net, a number of other people have seen this problem. I tried several things before finding one that worked for me.

First that that didn't work for me, based on this thread, I tried removing powernowd ('apt-get remove powernowd') but that offered no change.

Next thing that didn't work, based on this blog page, I followed the advice on this vmware knowledge based page:

# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "MHz"
cpu MHz : 2400.000
# vi /etc/vmware/config
# tail -3 /etc/vmware/config
host.cpukHz = 2400000
host.noTSC = TRUE
ptsc.noTSC = TRUE

and restarted vmware ('/etc/init.d/vmware restart'), but no luck.

Finally, what worked, even though it wasn't supposed to solve my problem, was, based on this page, I added the following to/etc/vmware/config:

host.useFastClock = FALSE

and restarted vmware ('/etc/init.d/vmware restart'). And that did it! No more syslog message about clock rate changes.

To clean up, I re-installed powernowd ('apt-get install powernowd') and that didn't seem to have any ill effects. I left all the changes to /etc/vmware/config.