[Info-vax] clock problems with OpenVMS x86 on VirtualBox

[Craig A. Berry]

I am running OpenVMS x86_64 E9.2-1 under VirtualBox 7.0.8 on macOS
Ventura 13.3.1 (a).  The host is a 2019 MacBook Pro with 2.3 GHz 8-Core
Intel Core i9.  The clock isn't working right, most easily seen by the
fact that the following two commands were typed exactly one minute apart:

$ sh time
    5-MAY-2023 19:07:35
$ sh time
    5-MAY-2023 19:07:45

So the system advances its clock about 10 seconds for every 60 seconds
of actual time.

Another way of illustrating the problem is by running the vups.com from
<https://emuvm.com/download/vups-com-benchmark/>, which says:

  Approximate System VUPs Rating : 10430.2 ( min: 950.4 max: 55125.0 )

Divide that number by 6 and it might almost be credible based on numbers
other people have been posting, though a factor of 10-15 would be more
believable.  The system is *not* in fact fast at all -- it takes about
15 seconds for MONITOR SYSTEM to initiate its display when nothing at
all is running.

I have not seen this anywhere in the VSI documentation, but this blog post:

<https://raymii.org/s/blog/OpenVMS_9.2_for_x86_Getting_Started.html>

says it's necessary to set the clock characteristics of the virtual
machine like so:

$ vboxmanage modifyvm <vmname> --hpet on

I have done so but observe no difference (everything posted above was
after running this command and restarting VirtualBox).  Supposedly this
setting "Enables . . . a High Precision Event Timer (HPET) which can
replace the legacy system timers," whatever that means. I guess one
possibility is that the command, while it returned no errors, also
didn't take effect for some reason.  I cannot tell from the following
output whether the non-default setting is in effect:

$ vboxmanage debugvm <vmname> info hpet
HPET status:
  config=0000000000000003     isr=0000000000000000
  offset=fffffff020435102 counter=0000000000000000 frequency=69841279 fs
  legacy-mode=on   timer-count=4
Timers:
  0: comparator=0000001022973a28 accumulator=0000000000022f4d (9999944 ns)
         config=ffffffff0000003c irq=0 en per cap_per cap_64
  1: comparator=00000000ffffffff accumulator=0000000000000000 (0 ns)
         config=ffffffff00000000 irq=8
  2: comparator=00000000ffffffff accumulator=0000000000000000 (0 ns)
         config=ffffffff00000000 irq=0
  3: comparator=00000000ffffffff accumulator=0000000000000000 (0 ns)
         config=ffffffff00000000 irq=0


Has anyone sen anything like this or has any ideas on how to debug/fix
it?  The only next step I can think of is to try VMWare Player and see
if it works better than VirtualBox.