I read up on it and it turn out it is the memory manager for WSL2. I found a process called vmmem eating up most of my RAM. I noticed my system as a whole was extremely sluggish. I suspect it may be related to the performance issues in VMWare Workstation 15.5.5. I have found the issue below is an open issue. It's so different from others' hardware configurations above that this problem definitely has nothing to do with CPU or something. I'm using an AMD Ryzen U processor and integrated Radeon Vega 8 graphics on Windows 10 v2004 (19041.264).
You need some additional steps to create an EFI boot partition and copy / install boot files to it, or to perform a complete re-installation. Note that switching firmware type may cause your existing VM OS installation unbootable. If you want to switch firmware type, you can go to VM Settings -> Options -> Advanced -> Firmware Type.
When creating a virtual machine, the default setting of firmware type is UEFI for Windows 10 and BIOS for older Windows and Linux, etc. I tried Hyper-V and VirtualBox using WHP with BIOS firmware but both of them resulted in normal speed, therefore, I assume that it's a problem on the VMware side. The speed when using BIOS firmware was EXTREMELY slow which literally made the VM unusable, while using UEFI firmware gave me a reasonable speed. For testing I tried installing Windows 10 v2004 using the same installation file and the same virtual machine configuration but one with BIOS firmware and the other with UEFI firmware. The performance downgrade is minor but still noticeable, though acceptable. You can verify this by using bcdedit command, which will list your system boot option under section and tell you whether Hyper-V core is enabled (hypervisorlaunchtype=auto means enabled).īut I've noticed that using UEFI firmware for the virtual machine partly solves the issue. If you enable Hyper-V, WSL2, Credential Guard or Windows SandBox, then VMware will automatically use Windows Hypervisor Platform. It existed back in the VMware Workstation 20H1 Technology Preview earlier this year. This performance problem occurs when VMware Workstation is using Windows Hypervisor Platform as virtualization platform.