Newly introduced bug in distro/upgrade.. no idea how to identify source....

My Kali distro in VMWare Workstation has been working like a charm for 8+ months.. no issues... within the last couple days, performance has significantly degraded - the system seems to run fine, but user input (keyboard specifically) is often delayed - like there is a backlog in the keyboard queue.

I tried everything I could think of in the existing Kali, and I gave up and created a new kali vm.

After almost a day of troubleshooting, I have found that a fresh install of Kali works excellent (using 2017.1), however, the instant I upgrade && dist-upgrade and reboot, the performance issues return.

I have recreated the Kali VM 4 times today, and every time, same problem. One option is to never upgrade Kali again (booo!), but I would much prefer to figure out what package has the bug and notify the maintainers and get it fixed.

Host is a Surface Book with 16 GB ram, 512 SSD, i7.
Guest has 8 GB ram, 45GB HD, single disk image.

What can I do for troubleshooting steps (besides picking through each of the 1000+ upgrade packages one at a time)? How do I find which package is the issue, so I can reach out to the maintainer?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


P.S. On a whim, after typing this entire post, and getting ready to give up, I decided to turn on "Accelerate 3D graphics" and give the machine 256 MB of video ram. Miraculously, the issue went away. But, why - what new package would require 3D acceleration to be turned on?

A guess on my part, but it's probably due to video driver changes. Since VMs now have good support for video cards, Debian probably changed some of the default video drivers to compensate.

I don't use Kali in a VM as much as before, but my habit was always to activate the 3D graphics option & boot video RAM to 128 MB.

Hi Rife, I had the exact same problem yesterday as well. I went and did this below to try and solve some compatibility issues with a new NIC and ended up like you did, and had to delete my VM instance of Kali and fresh it again with new one. So originally it was at Kali 4.9.18, and when it made it to 4.9.19 with a tone of updates (150MG worth I think), then after restart, it was super, super slow. Didn't matter if I increased the memory to 16GB, nothing worked.

Code:

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apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

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Word of caution; careful if you plan to execute the above when Kali is at:
Linux kali 4.9.0-kali3-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.9.18-1kali1 (2017-04-04) x86_64 GNU/Linux