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I have a HP Compaq 8200 PC with Intel i5 CPU. I have enabled VT-x in BIOS:

HP Compaq 8200 BIOS

..and CPU supports VT-x as it has vmx flag present in /proc/cpuinfo. I have loaded the kvm LKM:

root@VM-host:~# modprobe -v kvm
insmod /lib/modules/3.2.0-4-686-pae/kernel/arch/x86/kvm/kvm.ko 
root@LS15-C-LAB-VM-host:~# lsmod | grep kvm
kvm                   239136  0 
root@VM-host:~#

..but if I executed qemu with -enable-kvm option, it complained that:

Could not access KVM kernel module: No such file or directory
failed to initialize KVM: No such file or directory
No accelerator found!

/dev/kvm file was is indeed missing:

root@VM-host:~# ls -l /dev/kvm
ls: cannot access /dev/kvm: No such file or directory
root@VM-host:~#

Once I installed the qemu-kvm package, I was able to start the qemu with -enable-kvm option. As I had understood, kvm support is merged into qemu and all that is needed for qemu is kvm LKM. Why is qemu-kvm package needed in Debian Wheezy when running qemu with "-enable-kvm" option?

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qemu-kvm was indeed merged into QEMU, but that happened in version 1.3. Debian Wheezy ships QEMU 1.1.2 which still needs qemu-kvm for KVM support.

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  • I see. What kind of functionality does qemu-kvm provide? Interaction between qemu and kvm LKM? – Martin Mar 9 '15 at 20:28
  • That's right, it provides hardware-supported virtualisation in QEMU using KVM support in the kernel. – Stephen Kitt Mar 9 '15 at 21:34

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