Kali Extremly slow to load and run

[reagles]

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...

[reagles]

Update: In case anyone is following this, unfortunately I haven't made any progress on this.  Still can't find anything that'll resolve this issue.  Have tried different compatability settings as well.  Found some "fixes" for Ubuntu, but couldn't apply them to Kali.  Currently trying to install Parrot as a diffierent option, but everything still appears slow, it's taking a long time to unpack the image, but I'll wait to see if it's still slow once it's installed, but as it's also Debian I'm not expecting it to be any different.

Again, if anyone can provide any guidance or help on this it'll be greatly appreciated.  I'm not able to get any support from VMWare so I'm kind of relying on the community for this one.  Again I'd prefer to stick with VMWare, but I'm going to have to swap to Virtual Box by the look of things.

[Technogeezer]

You're running an Alder Lake (12th gen) Core processor. Its performance/efficiency core architecture and Windows handling of scheduling threads across the two types of threads are giving Workstation users fits.

If you're running Windows 11 as a host, try changing its power profile from "Balanced" to "Performance" and see if that makes a difference.

[reagles]

Many thanks for your reply @Technogeezer.  I did see a little bit about this before but because they were month's old I didn't put much stock in them as I though VMWare would have resolved the issue by now.  Turns out they haven't...

I tried changing the power profile as you suggested and although it definetly helped a little, unfortunatly it hasn't resolved the issue.  It's still miles slower than VirtualBox.  Did a bit more research into the Alder Lake issue and found some more possible solutions like disabling the E-cores in the setup file/s, but there's no guarantee that'll work either and it's really isn't something we should have to do.  I'm shocked VMWare haven't managed to get on top of this issue by now considering Alder Lake's been around for over a year.  Should have done a bit more research before purchasing this laptop, but it never crossed my mind that mainstream software wouldn't work with mainstream hardware...  Live and learn I guess.  Definitely won't be purchasing Workstation Pro now though.

Apologises for ranting...  But many many thanks again for pointing me in the right direction.  The path forward is much clearer now.

[Technogeezer]

Yes, it is a shame that VMware has not either addressed this in their products or told us exactly why they haven't. 

This performance/efficiency core architecture concept is not going away.

It's almost like "well, we don't support Alder Lake in ESXi, so we're not going to do that in the desktop products since we reuse a lot of ESXi code". I'd welcome a response by a VMware employee to tell me if I'm right or wrong - but I'm not hopeful that I'll get one.

[reagles]

I completly agree, it just doesn't make any scense.  And it's even more surprising that they appear to be ignoring it.  It's a worrying sign. It would at the very least be reassuring to have a VMWare employee address this, but like you say, I feel this is sadly unlikely. 😞

[Technogeezer]

One other thought from what I've seen recently:

See https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/SOLVED-VMware-workstation-17-low-performanc... especially the later comment on 1/23/2023 by @wila .

If you disable Hyper-V, and the VM runs on the VMware hypervisor instead of Hyper-V does the situation improve?

[wila]

Hi,

Normally yes.

But getting the Hyper-V hypervisor to be actually disabled and switching over to the VMware hypervisor is becoming more and more difficult.

Basically as long as you see "Monitor Mode: ULM" in the vmware.log file you're running under Hyper-V.

Like I said down there in my reply, don't forget to reboot the host after changing any of those settings.

-

Wil

[reagles]

I believe I've already tried that @Technogeezer but I gave it another go and unfortunately it's still didn't make any difference.  Still incredibly slow.  This is getting beyond frustrating.  If the issue is with Hyper-V then I think @wila could be right and it's hard to fully disable it now, but it seems like just another issue that VMWare needs to resolve. 

It's absolutely crazy that at the moment, I can't run a basic Linux VM on a well spec'd new laptop.

[Ferko]

Hi,

try to downgrade your Windows 11 host OS. I was experiencing poor performance on W11 22H2. I believe any previous version of WIndows 11 works fine. Workstation Pro has a new version 17.0.1 now. It may be that they fixed it but from release notes I could not tell. Have a try.

[autom4il]

Here same problem, I bought a vmware pro license and a new laptop with the intel 12gen since I needed a new machine to work with and guess what... Kali Linux is really really slow I started to question my self and I found this post. Nice, so there won't be any fix as far I can see. Well, I wanted to go with AMD but I said what could go wrong.

[korelamonk]

To anyone who has the same problem, here's what worked for me:

https://superuser.com/questions/1787733/insanely-slow-loading-of-linux-kernel-image-on-vmware-player

It looks like hypervisor settings should be turned off. Although, I don't know if it's going to cause any problems in the future.

[WazzyD]

Yeah been to the depths of the internet and tried all of the above options and settings and configs but Vmware 17 and Win 11 22H2 just don't work. Going back to Virtual Box to run my Kali.

[tuxGentoo01]

Video: NVidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti

donde instale el VMware Workstation 17 pro, creando una VM para Kali linux con las siguientes caracteristicas:

Memoria RAM: 8GB
Procesadores: Number of processors=4 - Number of cores processor=3 total 12

una ves concluido la instalacion y actualizado el sistema se pone lento y lo mas raro es cuando se abre tanto el firefox y chrome y ver algunos videos de youtube empeora, pense que era el problema del sistema Kali Linux entonces instale parrot y el mismo problema use pruebas con diferentes configuraciones y nada.

anteriormente tenia una portatil con menos recuros i5 de primera generacion con 8 de ram y instalaba el vmware donde creaba la maquina y corria normal sin ningum problema ahora en este equipo no funciona la vedda no se que pueda ser busque en google y no hay nada.

Tambien intente aumentar mas recursos a la VM pero persiste el problema en mi apreciación es que empeora.

[WazzyD]

After much struggling, this works with getting Kali to run smoothly on Vmware. I copy the below to a .bat file and run as administrator (You need to run the bat file again after a Windows updates...because Windows....) 

Download the dgreadiness tool from Microsoft and modify the path in the .bat file below. Once you run it you might see an error depending on whether settings are manged by registry or GPO. It will still complete and you will restart and hit the windows key to accept the disabling of virtualized-based security. 

You can check system information and you should see that virtualized based security will now show not enabled and you won't see the option for side channel mitigations in your VM settings.

@Echo off 
powershell.exe Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V-Hypervisor
powershell.exe Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName "Microsoft-Hyper-V"
bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off
dism /online /disable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-hyper-v-all
bcdedit /set vsmlaunchtype off
bcdedit /set '{0cb3b571-2f2e-4343-a879-d86a476d7215}' loadoptions DISABLE-LSA-ISO,DISABLE-VBS
powershell.exe C:\dgreadiness_v3.6\dgreadiness_v3.6\DG_Readiness_Tool_v3.6.ps1 -Disable
powercfg /powerthrottling disable /path "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\x64\vmware-vmx.exe"
exit /b