This is a KVM bug, not a QEMU bug. It only happens with ept=1 and unrestricted_guest=0. A workaround is to disable SMM in QEMU (-machine smm=off) or to set kvm_intel's ept parameter to 0.
I'm closing the bug here because it is the wrong tracker (also I know about it, can reproduce, and hope to provide a fix later this week). ** Changed in: qemu Status: New => Invalid -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1502934 Title: QEMU does not start when kvm enabled (SMM issue?) Status in QEMU: Invalid Bug description: Hi! QEMU stopped working after "[355023f2010c4df619d88a0dd7012b4b9c74c12c] pc: add SMM property" on my server. It says "Guest has not initialized the display (yet)." and nothing happens. But only if I use -enable- kvm. However, the problem gone after I hardcoded pc_machine_is_smm_enabled() to always return false (but I have little to no understanding of what SMM really is). CMD line that reproduces the issue: qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -display curses . It doesn't work the server, but works perfectly on my laptop :(. I'm using Arch Linux with all updates. Some info: Linux machine 4.2.2-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Sep 29 22:21:33 CEST 2015 x86_64 GNU/Linux Qemu-2.4.0 (tried HEAD as well) CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 950 @ 3.07GHz Some messages from dmesg, just in case: [ 6.996297] kvm: VM_EXIT_LOAD_IA32_PERF_GLOBAL_CTRL does not work properly. Using workaround [ 6381.722990] kvm: zapping shadow pages for mmio generation wraparound I'm more than happy to provide additional information if needed. Cheers, Alex To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1502934/+subscriptions