guest gettimeofday behavior

[Eran Rom <eranr@il.ibm.com>]

Hi All,
Am a newbie (to kvm, linux kernel, git, etc.) so apologize in advance for
missing/inaccurate info.
I am experiencing inconsistent behavior of guest gettimeofday, described below.
I have seen prior reference to the problem, however, it was not clear whether
the issue was solved or not and where.

Below is a description of my setup and the behavior I see.
Another question is whether oprofile with timer mode would suffer from the same
problem?

Otherwise I saw that kvm-85 has "generic performance counter msr handling", does
this mean that oprofile can be executed without the timer mode?

Thanks very much,
Eran

Setup:
Guest 32 bit ubuntu with 2.6.27 kernel
Host 64 bit Suse 10.2 with 2.6.27 kernel
1 quadcore Intel Xeon CPU
I am not sure about the kvm userspace code version.
Used git to create a repository, and then did
git checkout kvm-updates-2.6.27 (is that fixed in time?)

Behavior:
Running a code doing:
t1 = gettimeofday
t2 = gettimeofday
while t2-t1 < 5 minutes {
    sleep(1)
    t2 = gettimeofday
}

Ran it 10 times, each time in a 'newly launched' VM, halting it after the test.
8 out of 10 times the wall clock showed 5 minutes
1 time 4 minutes and 40 seconds
1 time 0 seconds