Restore from resume does not trigger timesync

[Perry G]

Pause a guest and wait for 2 minutes to any time you choose and then resume. Time will be off for the amount of time the guest was suspended. I waited 30 minutes to an hour and the time never adjusted smoothly or other wise.

I can run (elevated) VBoxService --timesync-set-threshold 1000 and as long as the guest is running (not rebooted) it appears that the time will sync within about 2-3 seconds after resuming.

I tried setting VBoxManage guestproperty set VM_NAME "/VirtualBox/GuestAdd/VBoxService/timesync-set-threshold" 1000 (with guest shut off) and verified that it was written to the machine.xml and started the guest. Paused,waited 3 minutes, & resumed. Thime did not reset. The only way I can get this to work is to set it on the guest while running as SU/SUDO and the VBoxService with parms. as stated above.

Question: What if anything will happen while running like this, and what am I missing since it does not work setting it with VBoxManage?

[Frank Mehnert]

Perry, your VBoxManage line is wrong, you forgot the leading two dashes of the PARAMETER.

I really doubt that the guest does not smoothly adapt the guest time. The adaption might be pretty small, only a few milliseconds per minute and therefore it t might look like there is no adaption at all. You can check this by manually starting VBoxService (make sure to terminate the other service first) with

/usr/sbin/VBoxService -fvvv

and then monitoring the time difference between guest and host.

[Perry G]

Color me embarrassed. I put it in and VBoxManage accepted it so I thought there you go. Usually when I leave something off it slaps me across the face and then I do a face palm but this time it alluded me. Thank you!

The reason I was working on this is a lot of people use the pause/resume and have been complaining about the timesync. They like me can not see the millisecond/minute adjustment and I needed a way to force it. If you know of a better way please let me know.

[Frank Mehnert]

The smooth adjustment usually takes quite long and the OS is responsible for choosing a proper interval. Changing the time more quickly can confuse certain applications.

But you say that you / they can not see any adjustment, did you verify that by starting VBoxService manually as I told you above? It will print the current drift (between some other values) and the drift should decrease over the time.

[Perry G]

When I say I don't see it I mean I do not have a seconds display on the screen. I am sure that the time is syncing but the eye can not see the millisecond/minute change on the desktop clock and a difference of 15 minutes would take hours to catch up.

I actually understand why and that's fine. No one wants to force change on a server (that would cause a lot of problems).

The force is just for users that use pause/resume as they certainly will not be on a server. It would be nice if the pause/resume worked the same way as the resume from restore which forces a time resync just fine.

[Perry G]

Since this does work as intended please change this to a feature request instead of an issue.

"Resume from paused should work like restore from saved".

Thanks for clearing this up for me.