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I have two shiny new Thinkpad X1 Carbons here. One is a gen 10 (12th Gen Intel i7-1260P). One is gen 11 (13th Gen i713SSU). Both are running Window 11 Pro 22H2. I have a Linux (Slackware 15.0) virtual machine I've copied onto both from a previous setup (hence the VM images are identical). I'm running VMWare Workstation player on both (17.0.2 build 21581411 to be precise)

On the gen10 machine everything works fine. On the gen 11 almost everything works fine, except:

  • If I boot the VM on the gen 10 it takes 7 seconds to fully boot
  • If I boot the same VM on the gen 11 it takes nearly 9 minutes just to get past the point where it says "Loading Linux..."

The rest of the boot process is noticeably slower on the supposedly newer machine but not crazily so.

Possibly related oddities:

  • The CPU on the gen 11 is supposed to be 3.70 GHz P-cores up to 5.00 GHz but says 1.7GHz on Windows performance panel
  • The gen 10 has 32GB of RAM. The gen 11 has 16GB - 32 wasn't an available option for some reason and it was running fine on the old system which was also 16

I've tried:

  • Changing the power settings on Windows (both set to best performance anyway)
  • Disabling the side channel mitigations it warns me about on startup (ulm.disableMitigations = "TRUE")
  • Doing a fresh install on a new VM from a base slackware 15 ISO - this installed fine but exhibited the same startup issue
  • Reducing the RAM for the machine from 8G down to 4G

None of the above made any appreciable difference. If there was a hundred times performance issue on the system generally, I'd have noticed and sent it back already so I can only imagine this is some funky interaction between hardware / windows / VMWare settings?

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  • I have two X1s here (one older). Neither takes 9 minutes to load - not even close. Copy the 9 minute machine to the other computer and see if it is machine problem. Did you starve the 9 minute machine for host resources? That is, too many resources applied to the guest machine?
    – John
    Jun 6 at 23:05
  • Edited the question to indicate that I've already tried reducing the RAM. They're both copies of the original anyway. Possibly some VMware setting - I'm not entirely sure how to copy those over by themselves.
    – Richard Wheeldon
    Jun 6 at 23:10
  • 1
    Copy the Folder over to the other machine (give the folder a different name so as not to overwrite the good machine).
    – John
    Jun 6 at 23:11

2 Answers 2

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Eventually figured this out. It's the MS Hyper-V nonsense crippling performance.

This article https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/since-the-latest-W11-updates-my-W10-vm-s-are-extremely-slow/td-p/2938324 describes slow performance of VMs in general. Why it should be specifically bad for kernel loading I don't know.

If the line vmx Monitor Mode: ULM appears in the VMWare log (alongside the Virtual machine images and settings), it's doomed.

If the line vmx Monitor Mode: CPL0appears instead then it'll be all good.

Similarly, if the line in Window's System information says "Virtualization-based security" is "Not enabled" then VMWare has a chance. Otherwise, as the article above says "VMware Workstation has to switch to MS's hypervisor in order to be able to even run". We need to disable this (and anything that forces it to be on at startup)

Steps to fix:

  • Search for "Core isolation"
  • Find the checkbox under "Memory integrity" and turn it off
  • Run bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off at the Windows command line as an admin
  • Reboot and try again - it may work at this point
  • If not locate the various entries under Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceGuard in regedit and turn them all to zero
  • If that doesn't work, again edit the registry and change or add DWORD entries to zero for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\LsaCfgFlags and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceGuard\LsaCfgFlags
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I tried @Richard Wheeldon's solution but the vmx Monitor Mode: ULM state was unchanged. However what did work for me was enabling the Hardware acceleration for my machine.

Location:

  • When your VM is running> Edit > Preferences > Display > Graphics

and ensure "Hardware Acceleration for remote virtual machine" is checked. I realize it is for remote hosts but I don't exactly know why it worked for me. Hope it helps!

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