KVM
According to this post installing and running KVM under a recent version of Ubuntu is easy as:
$ sudo aptitude install kvm qemu $ sudo kvm -hda machinify.img -m 384 open /dev/kvm: No such file or directory Could not initialize KVM, will disable KVM support Ubuntu does not support running KVM without hardware acceleration. Sorry.
So, not quite.
It appears I don't have the capability to run kvm, or at least it is not turned on.
The capability is VT (virtualization technology?) and is seen as flag vmx from /proc/cpuinfo on Intel platform. On AMD it is seen as svm and referred to as AMD-v hardware virtualization support (Pacifica).
Here is the command used from linux to detect VT support is available/enabled.
$ egrep '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo
No output? If your hardware is new enough (no older than 2007) you can check to see if VT happens to be disabled in the BIOS which is often the default.
Steps to enable virtualization (VT) capability.
- Reboot your system
- Drop into BIOS setup (Usually F2 or Del)
- Look for virtualization support and enable
- Save & Exit
- After reboot, login and examine /proc/cpuinfo flags again, as shown above
One other thing, after reviewing the kvm(1) man page I tried this to no avail.
$ sudo kvm -no-kvm -hda machinify.img -m 384 Ubuntu does not support running KVM without hardware acceleration. Sorry.