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I have an IBM POWER7 Big-Endian with Debian-10-PPC64 host and Qemu-system-x86_64 (for running Linux x86 guests) installed. KVM module is present and loaded but I can't get it enabled.

Whatever attempts made result in "qemu-system-x86_64: invalid accelerator kvm". And "qemu-system-x86_64 -accel help" says that "Accelerators supported in QEMU binary: tcg"

  1. Does Qemu in Debian PPC64 support KVM integration?
  2. Is it possible compile Qemu from scratch and enable this feature? It would be necessary to compile kernel code too?

Thank you in advance.

Mark
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KVM requires that the host and guest architecture are the same (because it is using the virtualization hardware of the host CPU). That means that you can't use it to run an x86-64 guest on a PPC host, and that's why qemu-system-x86_64 (when built for PPC hosts) says it does not have KVM support. You need to use qemu-system-ppc64 and a PPC64 guest OS.

Peter Maydell
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    KVM is not merely "more useful" in that environment -- it is *only* functional there, because it is specifically "use the host's CPU for same-guest-same-host". You *cannot* run QEMU with KVM support in any other way. – Peter Maydell May 11 '21 at 17:00
  • Why do you keep trying to do the same thing I said at the start would not work? You *must* use the same guest and host architecture. – Peter Maydell May 11 '21 at 20:25
  • Sorry. Only now did I understand what you meant. KVM will work with qemu-system-ppc/ppc64. The issue is that my Debian-x86 guest must run with bus/throughput higher than 3GB/s. Just for you to know the guest only achevied 1.1 GB/s when running "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=1M". So I'm searching for a way to do that without using kvm. Thank you very much. – Mark May 11 '21 at 21:40