I'm currently running into a problem when running recent Linux kernels as a guest under QEMU with KQEMU kernel acceleration. My problem is that early in the boot process the guest kernel panics, the host OS appears to be unaffected. The panic can be different depending on the guest Linux distribution/kernel but the panic is repeatable and consistent. In all cases, removing the '-kernel-kqemu' flag and only making use of userspace acceleration appears to solve the problem. Using both the QEMU monitor and the linux lsmod reference count I have verified that KQEMU is being used by QEMU.
For reference, the host OS is a Gentoo 2007.0 x86 system with the Gentoo Linux kernel 2.6.23-r1, QEMU 0.9.0 and KQEMU 1.3.0_pre11; greater detail can be found in the Gentoo bug report[1]. I have also noticed this on other Gentoo based systems as well. I am able to reproduce this on a regular basis using the Fedora 8 install DVD and the following command line: # qemu -m 256 -kernel-kqemu -cdrom Fedora-8-i386-DVD.iso -boot d f8.img However, using a sample image[2] and the following command line I do not see any problems: # qemu -m 256 -kernel-kqemu linux-0.2.img Any assistance or pointers to a solution would be greatly appreciated. If there is anything I can do to help track down the problem further please let me know. Thanks, -Paul [1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199151 [2] http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/linux-0.2.img.bz2