KVM problem

[Neal Murphy <neal.p.murphy@alum.wpi.edu>]

Howdy!

A friend is having the devil's own time trying to get qemu-kvm working for 
himself. I have no such trouble.

We are both using Squeeze. I have a quad Phenom-II with 8GB RAM, nVidia video. 
He has a dual Athlon with 3GB RAM, ATI video (and recently bought and tried an 
nVidia AGP card). Both CPUs support HV.

I use KDE. He uses Gnome.

I wrote a bash script that greatly simplifies and greatly automates 
configuring and running KVM VMs while avoiding network/vdisk collisions among 
them.

Using that script, I can run many VMs without trouble. They all start and 
operate fast. My friend can only run one at fast (normal) speed. The next VM 
will almost never get around to starting; the video simply won't respond. But 
if I tell it 'vga=none' and use a serial console, the VM inits slower than 
normal, but then the serial console runs at normal speed.

I am at a loss to explain. He had the same problem on an older system using 
qemu (no KVM) on an athlon that did not support HV.

If this a known problem with a solution, would someone kindly point me in the 
right direction?

If it is not a known problem, what data are needed to root out the cause? Does 
anyone have any idea why I'd have no trouble and he'd have nothing but?

Hmmm. I just remembered a tiny bit of something. A while back (a year or two) 
I had to DL and install an updated kvm/qemu BIOS, video interface, or 
something like that, before KVM would behave acceptably. Could it be related 
to that?

Thanks,
Neal