Comment 0 for bug 1741655

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Nathan Rennie-Waldock (nathan-renniewaldock) wrote :

Since upgrading from zesty to artful, I'm not longer able to use KVM on my server:
# modprobe kvm-intel
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'kvm_intel': Input/output error

Searching tells me this is caused by requiring Virtual NMI support[1]

Running the script provided on the mailing list[1] to check virtualization features confirms my CPU (Xeon E5345) doesn't support Virtual NMIs:
# python features.py | grep NMI
  NMI exiting yes
  Virtual NMIs no
  NMI-window exiting no

Virtual NMI support was required in v4.12[1] and later reverted in v4.14.3[2] as some models (including Xeons) don't support it, even if others with the same core do.

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1490803
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/7/231
[3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git/commit/arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c?h=linux-4.13.y&id=2c82878b0cb38fd516fd612c67852a6bbf282003
[4] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git/commit/arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c?h=linux-4.14.y&id=a77360e989f3dc06e4f177a0837d533d13a20d91