KVM kernel module error

Question

I just installed qemu and ran

qemu-system-i386 -hda ubuntu32 -cdrom ~/Downloads/ubuntu-12.04-desktop-i386.iso -m 1024 -boot d

and got some errors

Could not access KVM kernel module: No such file or directory
failed to initialize KVM: No such file or directory
Back to tcg accelerator.

Anyone know why this happens?

Solution

I am by no means an expert, however from what I know this could happen because either:

a) Your CPU does not support hardware virtualization

b) CPU does support virtualization, but you have not enabled it in BIOS.

Comments

[Aras]

I had the same issue and trying to load the KVM kernel module would give this error: FATAL: Error inserting kvm_intel /lib/modules kernel/arch/x86/kvm/kvm-intel.ko Operation not supported -- your solution worked for me as well. I just had to shutdown and unplug the laptop after changing the BIOS setting to enable virtualization support

[Programster]

I have the same issue on ubuntu 12.04 server. I even installed cpu-checker and ran kvm-ok which returned INFO: /dev/kvm exists and KVM acceleration can be used. Have run kvm in the past on this machine, stumped as to what I've done differently this time.