Fedora Core 4 - Timers don't operate correctly; sleep sleeps for too long

[Chris Tait]

I have a fairly old Fedora 4 32-bit guest OS, running on VirtualBox 2.2.2 on Ubuntu Jaunty Server 64-bit Host OS. I have a java app that sets timers etc. but they don't go off at the correct time, and I have noticed strange behaviour when using the sleep command in the guest OS, so am documenting that as it's easy to reproduce.

e.g. If I type the following, then I'd expect it to display two different times that are about 2 seconds apart, and take 2 seconds to run:

date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%N'; sleep 2; date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%N'

This does display two different times that are 2 seconds apart, but actually takes about 8 seconds to run.

[root@carrot2 ~]# date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%N'; sleep 2; date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%N'
2009-05-21 23:38:24.112116000
2009-05-21 23:39:26.220065000
[root@carrot2 ~]# 

I've also tried running "xclock -digital -update 1" (with the DISPLAY going to another machine) and the clock doesn't tick over at the normal rate unless I'm keeping the guest OS busy by holding down the enter key in my ssh session.

Note that if I try the exact same things within a Jaunty guest OS running on the same host OS then everything works fine.

Apologies if this is already recorded as a bug. I tried searching the bug database for 'timer' and 'sleep' with virtualbox 2.2.2 but couldn't see anything.

[Chris Tait]

Extra info:

# uname -a
Linux carrot2.mydomain 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 #1 Thu Jun 2 22:55:56 EDT 2005 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux