Loading KVM AMD module fails

Question

I want to use QEMU+KVM on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric but virt-manager warns that KVM is not loaded and performance will suffer.

The problem may depend on the fact that

sudo modprobe kvm-amd

fails with error

FATAL: Error inserting kvm_amd (/lib/modules/3.0.0-13-generic/kernel/arch/x86/kvm/kvm-amd.ko): Operation not supported

eventhough

sudo modprobe kvm

succeeds without warnings. What is wrong?

Solution

It may be that the AMD CPU doesn't have the virtualization extensions

egrep '(vmx|svm)' --color=always /proc/cpuinfo

Since you have an AMD, if you don't have svm in there, then you can't load kvm-amd.

It might be disabled in the BIOS, many vendors disable it by default.