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?