http://d4wiki.goddamm.it/index.php/Howto:_Mac_OSX_on_KVM

It seems as though KVM/qemu itself needs to be patched to emulate the AppleSMC hardware device.  I can’t yet find out of the current Ubuntu 7.x or 8.x distros of KVM include this patch or not.  It does seem like this has already made it to opensuse, and the patch is nearly a year old, so maybe it’s in Ubuntu 8.x or 9.x:  Here’s the patch itself:

http://svn.exactcode.de/t2/trunk/package/emulators/kvm/04-qemu-applesmc.patch

Unfortunately, the author’s website (http://alex.csgraf.de/self/) seems to be really borked and no longer has the relevant information other than the “getsmc” script referenced from the wiki page.  (Not sure if this getsmc script is for Apple h/w + OSX or Apple + Linux)

There is an “applesmc” kernel module for Ubuntu, but I suspect this is for accessing the *real* SMC device, not for emulating one on non-Apple hardware.

# kvm -no-acpi -vnc :1 -m 2000 -cdrom ./ubuntu-7.10-jeos-i386.iso ../test.img -boot d
exception 6 (0)
rax 0000000000000469 rbx 0000000000800001 rcx 0000000000004300 rdx 0000000000000000
rsi 000000000005961d rdi 000000000005961c rsp 00000000fffaa9cc rbp 000000000000200c
r8 0000000000000000 r9 0000000000000000 r10 0000000000000000 r11 0000000000000000
r12 0000000000000000 r13 0000000000000000 r14 0000000000000000 r15 0000000000000000
rip 000000000000b04b rflags 00033006
cs 4143 (00041430/0000ffff p 1 dpl 3 db 0 s 1 type 3 l 0 g 0 avl 0)
ds 4004 (00040040/0000ffff p 1 dpl 3 db 0 s 1 type 3 l 0 g 0 avl 0)
es 4004 (00040040/0000ffff p 1 dpl 3 db 0 s 1 type 3 l 0 g 0 avl 0)
ss 0000 (00000000/0000ffff p 1 dpl 3 db 0 s 1 type 3 l 0 g 0 avl 0)
fs 3002 (00030020/0000ffff p 1 dpl 3 db 0 s 1 type 3 l 0 g 0 avl 0)
gs 0000 (00000000/0000ffff p 1 dpl 3 db 0 s 1 type 3 l 0 g 0 avl 0)
tr 0000 (7d850000/00002088 p 1 dpl 0 db 0 s 0 type b l 0 g 0 avl 0)
ldt 0000 (00000000/0000ffff p 1 dpl 0 db 0 s 0 type 2 l 0 g 0 avl 0)
gdt 40920/47
idt 0/ffff
cr0 60000010 cr2 0 cr3 0 cr4 0 cr8 0 efer 0
code: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Aborted

And, if I

# rmmod kvm kvm_intel

Then it can boot, but without the KVM kernel modules, the performance is horrible. The KVM pages say that these exceptions are due to the fact that some Intel processors doesn’t emulate some 8088 instructions. Well, if that means that I can’t boot my install media, then its pretty pointless, isn’t it? BTW, would it be that hard to emulate these unfrequently used instructions properly?

I’m going to see if I can get through the install process without the kernel module (under full emulation), and then boot the resultant image with the module installed, but I don’t have much hope that it’ll work very well.

In the mean time, I’m reading up on Xen, which I think is a bit more mature than KVM is…