Greetings,

I have an HP Pavilion laptop I am running Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS as my main OS. I have installed Kali Linux 2018.4 in a Virtual Machine.

For some reason, whenever I try to run the Virtual Machine my computer runs extremely slow. I gave Kali 50GB of space and have the RAM set to 4GB. I tried giving it more RAM, but it wouldn’t let me.

Are there some settings that I should maybe set to fix this? I can’t find anything that looks wrong.

I'd appreciate some help.

Thanks.
Dragon

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

What model number is the HP?

How much total RAM is installed in the HP

Which Virtualization software are you running i.e VMware, VirtualBox etc.

System Information
Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard
Product Name: HP Pavilion 17 Notebook PC
Version: 0976110000405E00000620180
Serial Number: 6CC4021291
UUID: 34444335-3230-3231-3931-A01D48D72D83
Wake-up Type: Power Switch
SKU Number: F9L89UAR#ABA
Family: 103C_5335KV G=N L=CON B=HP S=PAV

RAM: 8GB

VMWare Workstation 15 Player

that model is from 2015 and has a decent intel processor, however there might be some problems with hybrid graphics. maybe show us the output of you could also try the same with virtualbox to see if it makes any difference.

in any case, on the host, enter in a terminal, maximise, leave open, then reproduce the problem.
what is eating your resources?
is it mostly memory consumption, disk io, CPU?

Based on it's version number, here are the specs from HP. One of my biggest beefs when shopping for a laptop for "others", while trying to stay within their spending range is HP's implementation of cheap HDD. Typically 5400 rpm, which is what this one has. You have to spend a good buck on an HP to get a 7200 rpm drive, many other OEM will use a better quality 7200 rpm drive in much lower end models.

Here are the results from the first line:
Attached is the screenshot of the results from running "top".

Attached Thumbnails

 

OK, no hybrid graphics afaics (i suppose you entered the command exactly as specified; it's preferable to include that in your output).
i'm not sure at all with amd graphics, but isn't it advisable to use amdgpu instead of radeon?
but i would have to search for that just as much as you, so.

yes very nice, but my instructions were clear:
a static screenshot does not help here.
even so, the case looks pretty obvious to me.

Yes, I was wondering why it was using Radeon instead of AMD myself. I did a fresh install of Ubuntu after formatting the hard drive, so it should have detected I had an AMD video card. I'll have to look into that.

I realized the static screenshot wasn't going to be much help, but I was hoping someone would see something I missed on it.

Either way, thanks for the help, I'll have to do some research on the differences between Radeon and AMD drivers.

are you not seeing the glaring 120% CPU usage for vmware???

i'm not even sure to which extent this can be mitigated with a better gpu driver. probably doesn't make a difference.

Yes, I saw that VMWare was dominating the CPU usage. I just don't know what to do about it. I'm going to look into it some more. I'm also going to look into Virtual Box to see if that will work for me as well.

virtualisation is expensive.
kali is not exactly a lightweight linux distro (gnome desktop and all), and of course it depends on what you do with it when it's running.
and then it depends on your host hardware.
i have a ubuntu 18.04 vm (uses the gnome desktop, like kali), and it regularly makes my 2x2 processors @ 3.7GHz (intel i3) run hot, without actually doing anything with it.
so what's your hardware?

of course some tweaking might be possible; you should check your vmware documentation.

I'm using the Kali Linux because I'm taking a class on Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing. I'd prefer to have my own installation of the OS where I can keep notes and such than to run the Virtual classroom environment where I can't.

From what I can tell, it is just too much for my computer to handle. This is my first time using a virtual machine though, so I will look into the settings to see if there is anything I can "tweak" to make it run better.

My computer has an Intel i7 with 8GB of RAM. It's been a great computer since I got it. Lately though it doesn't boot up right away, I have to power cycle it at start up until the video card kicks in. Otherwise it will boot, but I won't have any display. I'm sure that is part of the problem, but once it is up and running it works fine for everything else.

that would be my guess, too.
and btw, if it is then its due to the GNOME desktop and not due to kali itself.
essentially you don't even need a gui for most pentesting tools, maybe there's a kali CLI-only install?
or maybe backbox instead (heard about that on a podcast; ubuntu-based but lightweight desktop).

sounds like a topic for a new thread.

you might want to give less memory and cpu to the VM. That will make your computer faster, but probably the VM will be slower (or useless).