Qemu with kvm is very, very slow

Question

Hi!
I first installed kvm by following http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kvm
And I also tried the "using qemu with kvm support" method from http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU
With both methods, a VM is very, very slow (when i start an iso, you literally see it render the things, and after that when you get the grub menu, it takes ages for the pointer to move if you press the arrow keys).
I'm on a Dell laptop with Intel C2D cpu with VT support (and enabled in bios, I checked)
[dieter@dieter-dellD620-arch ~]$ egrep '^flags.*(vmx|svm)|model name' /proc/cpuinfo
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T7200 @ 2.00GHz
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm tpr_shadow
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T7200 @ 2.00GHz
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm tpr_shadow
[dieter@dieter-dellD620-arch ~]$ lsmod | egrep 'qemu|vbox|kvm'
kvm_intel 43752 0
kvm 169896 1 kvm_intel
[dieter@dieter-dellD620-arch ~]$ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/65-kvm.rules
KERNEL=="kvm", NAME="%k", GROUP="kvm", MODE="0660"
[dieter@dieter-dellD620-arch ~]$ ls -alh /dev/kvm
crw-rw---- 1 root kvm 10, 232 2009-07-18 17:12 /dev/kvm
[dieter@dieter-dellD620-arch ~]$ grep kvm /etc/group
kvm:x:78:dieter
anyone an idea?

Answer 1

damjan wrote:
try qemu-kvm-0.10.5, it's the stable qemu with additional kvm support:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kvm/fil … z/download
also, in the qemu monitor you can check to see if kvm is used with "info kvm" .. should return "kvm support: enabled"
finally, the grub menu is using old BIOS APIs and cpu pooling since it's running in 16bit mode with no drivers. It uses up 100% of one of my cores when I leave a VM on the grub menu. Make sure you run a serious OS soon and check performance there.
Thanks
- i am using 0.10.5 (this is the version that Arch has packaged)
- it says kvm enabled, and you're right, once it goes out of grub, it goes much faster!
- apparently my keyboard arrows are just plainly being ignored