VM hang: how to get latest sources

My VM keeps hanging (high host CPU use, no response except from the monitor) and I assume the first advice I will get is to use the current version of qemu/kvm.

Where and what is that? It seems there is a development and production release, and things have mostly been folded into qemu. I'm not sure what flavor is appropriate. Some earlier messages on the list referred to a git repo.

I'm running Debian wheezy amd64 with linux kernel 3.2.0-4-amd64 and qemu-kvm 1.1.2+dfsg-6. It looks as if the most current version in sid is qemu-system-x86 (1.6.0+dfsg-1). If the side version is recent enough it would probably be a bit easier for me to get going.

I would like to avoid upgrading the kernel if possible.

I am invoking with -cpu pentium3 -smp 2. The host processor is Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1245 V2 @ 3.40GHz (4 cores, 8 hyperthreads).

If anyone can help me on my problems with the current version, I would welcome it. Here are some more questions.

Do I get hardware virtualization if I specify -cpu pentium3?

Side note: I'm not sure I need the -cpu at all; I am trying to recover a 32 bit OS (Debian Lenny) that ran on a Pentium 4 before it died. I may try running without the -cpu argument to see if that helps.

Details of the crashes are at
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=724798. Any ideas about what's going on? How can I capture more useful diagnostic information?

Thanks.
Ross Boylan

If you're having trouble capturing console output, use a serial console:

 $ qemu -serial stdio ...

On the GRUB kernel command-line add console=ttyS0. Then the guest consoel messages will appear in your terminal on the host.

Stefan