FreeBSD 6.0 and VMware 5.5

FreeBSD has always worked well "out of the box" for me in VMware, until FreeBSD 6.0 and VMware Workstation 5.5. FreeBSD was having serious issues with time, which caused serious issues with the network stack, amongst other things.


Thanks to some advice from Scott Ullrich, and a VMware forum post from Richard Bejtlich, I was able to get things going.


In short, add the following two lines to /boot/loader.conf

hint.apic.0.disabled="1"
kern.hz="100"

And one line to /etc/sysctl.conf

kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254

Then reboot, and all will be well.