Kali 2020.1B / VMware Workstation (W10 Host) - GNOME freezing with Xwayland at 100% CPU

[space-cowboy-maurice]

Hi there,

I have Kali 2020.1B w/GNOME desktop environment running in VMWare Workstation Pro on a Windows 10 host. Kali installed from the .iso

I've been experiencing consistent freezes after the Kali VM has been running for a few minutes.

In hopes of troubleshooting this further, after rebooting the VM I started the SSH service hoping that I could still SSH in after the 'freeze' occurred. Sure enough, I was able to and observed that when the Kali VM was in this frozen state the Xwayland process was pinned at 99% CPU usage.

kali@kali:/var/log$ top
top - 12:34:38 up 9 min,  2 users,  load average: 1.00, 0.80, 0.41
Tasks: 180 total,   2 running, 178 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 50.0 us,  0.2 sy,  0.0 ni, 49.8 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :   7938.1 total,   6469.6 free,   1017.5 used,    451.0 buff/cache
MiB Swap:   8190.0 total,   8190.0 free,      0.0 used.   6670.4 avail Mem

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
   1297 kali      20   0  468820  56688  35544 R  99.7   0.7   7:11.81 Xwayland
   1642 kali      20   0   13412   6080   4868 S   0.3   0.1   0:00.05 sshd
      1 root      20   0  101524  10988   8284 S   0.0   0.1   0:01.35 systemd
      2 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
      3 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 rcu_gp
      4 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 rcu_par_gp
      6 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 kworker/0:0H-kblockd
      8 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.03 kworker/u256:0-events_unbound
      9 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 mm_percpu_wq
     10 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0   0.0   0:00.02 ksoftirqd/0
     11 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.04 rcu_sched
     12 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 migration/0

I've since switched to using an Xorg instread of Wayland and so far I have not encountered the freeze again.

To switch to Xorg:

1. Open /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf in a text editor
2. Uncomment the line "WaylandEnable=false"
3. Reboot
4. Once logged in again, confirm by opening a terminal and running: echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE. Result should now be x11 (instead of wayland)