Trying to build a VM using the 18.04.2 lowlatency kernels. Everything is working fine with the generic kernels (4.15 and 4.18), but when I attempt to boot either the 4.15 or 4.18 lowlatency kernels, the guest VM hangs at the login screen (sometimes in the middle of typing the password).
I have tried VMware Workstation 14.1.7 on a RHEL 7 host. I have also tried a VMware Player 15.1 on a Windows 10 host. In both cases, I start by installing the 18.04.2 desktop ISO image, then update to the latest with an 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. Everything works fine if I stick with the generic kernel. I have tried installations with and without open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools-desktop. It doesn't seem to matter if these are installed or not.
After 'apt-get install linux-lowlatency' I end up with the 4.15.0-55-lowlatency kernel. Modifying /etc/default/grub to enable the menu. Running 'update-grub' to process the grub changes. Reboot, and the system hangs at the login screen. Unable to reboot or poweroff the VM. On RHEL, I need to 'ps -ef | grep vmware' and manually kill off the processes, otherwise I cannot even close the VMware Workstation window.
I can repeat the same if I update to the 4.18.0-25-lowlatency kernel. So it isn't specific to 4.15 or 4.18, but it is specific to the lowlatency kernel.
I also tried the Wayland workaround described here: Unable to login to account in ubuntu 18.04 vmware workstation 15, after update. This did not help.
My VM is configured with 8GB RAM, 64GB HDD, 2-core processor. I begin to suspect that multiple cores with the lowlatency kernel were exploiting a race condition somwhere. So, I just tried switching to 1-core. Sure enough, that did it. This will be a good temporary workaround, as I can now login and use the VM with the lowlatency kernel. Any suggestions on what I should capture to try and debug where the race condition exists? I haven't tried switching to lightdm yet, which other posts seem to suggest might work, too. But, if this is a bug in gdm3, is it a known issue that is being worked, or has been fixed in a newer version?
