Hi all,
I'm hoping you can help with this as I've run out of Google answers and I have no idea how to fix this, I'm super confused. I've used VMware Workstation for a long time, and it's definitely my preferred choice. I recently got a new laptop (i7-1260p, 32GB RAM, Win 11 Pro) and wanted to run Kali on it, however it was really slow. Got a note saying "You are running this virtual machine with side channel mitigation enabled" and basically I had to disable it to speed it up. Never seen it before, but I guessed it was because I'm on latest spec stuff, but I couldn't see how to do this in standard Workstation, so I thought I'd try out Pro to try out this fix. Was able to disable it but still really slow to load/run.
Started Googling it and saw other people have had similar issues, so I've tried all the solutions I could find; tried turning Hyper-V off with the bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off command, and turned off memory isolation in Core Isolation, I've changed the memory preferences for VMware Pro to 'Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM'. I've tried various combinations of device setup from 2GB Memory to 16GB's, 2 cores to 8. Different Linux versions within the setup, (usually Debian). I've tried iso installs and re-downloading, extracting and installing images. Same everytime, if anything it's getting worse.
It'll often (slowly) get to the point where it says 'Loading inital ramdisk' and then take about a minute or more to continue. And then when you're in, everything is slow. For example Firefox takes 5-10 seconds to load.
I've downloaded Virtual Box, and it's working perfectly on there, but I'd much rather use VMware as I prefer it. Does anyone else have any other ideas on what this could be and how to fix it? I'm ashamed to say I'm not sure where or how to find the log files to provide more data so apologises for not putting them up.
Many many thanks in advance for any help you can offer. Like I said trying to fix this is driving me nuts...
