Yes qemu-kvm greatly improves the performance of the virtual machine.
Thanks David.  Also, I discovered the main reason for the failed boot
- the x86_64 live DVD image needs more memory than the default value
(128 megs), and works happily with 256 megs ('-m 256').

On 3/5/14, David Sommerseth <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 05/03/14 18:23, Boryeu Mao wrote:
>> I did use qemu-system-x86_64 on the SL65 image.  I will first try
>> qemu-kvm, and then (as a lst resort) virt-manager and libvirtd - I had
>> to do quite a bit work to get libvirt going when I was using
>> Debian/Knoppix, and the relative simplicity of qemu-system-x86_64
>> (just 'qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom CDROM.iso') was quite nice.  In any
>> event the advantage of libvirt may be worth the work.
>
> My experience with virt-manager on Fedora, RHEL and SL the last 3-4
> years have been that it's quite capable as a desktop virtualisation
> tool.  The pacakges available out of the box have sane default configs
> to "just get started (tm)".
>
> If you want to use more advanced features, virsh is the command line
> interface to libvirt.  But having a little idea of the features
> available in virt-manager can help understanding virsh better.
>
>
> --
> kind regards,
>
> David Sommerseth
>
>
>
>> On 3/5/14, David Sommerseth <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>> On 05/03/14 16:32, Boryeu Mao wrote:
>>>> I have recently migrated from Debian-based Knoppix to SL
>>>> (livecd-iso-to-disk from SL-65-x86_64-2014-02-06-LiveDVD.iso), and
>>>> installed the emulator from the package
>>>> qemu-system-x86-1.0-27.2.x86_64.rpm).  The emulator booted a Knoppix
>>>> image without incidents (albeit somewhat slowly,
>>>> KNOPPIX_V7.2.0DVD-2013-06-16-EN.iso).  However, booting the SL 65
>>>> LiveDVD didn't go so well - it hangs in the startup screen with the
>>>> inner arc stopping at about 3 o'clock position.  I wonder if there may
>>>> be another package for qemu that I should use, or if there is another
>>>> virtual machine that may be more robust for SL.  Thanks in advance for
>>>> help or suggestions.
>>>>
>>>> SL-65-x86_64-2014-02-06-LiveDVD.iso (via livecd-iso-to-disk)
>>>> HP laptop Pavilion g6 with dual AMD A6-4400M APU
>>>
>>> AFAICT, AMD A6-4400M supports hardware virtualization (aka KVM in the
>>> Linux world).  I'd recommend you to try using qemu-kvm instead of
>>> qemy-system-x86.  That should improve the performance noticeably.
>>>
>>> In addition, the SL image you've downloaded is 64 bits.  I don't know if
>>> you try to run that via qemu-system-i386 or qemu-system-x86_64.  The
>>> former is 32bit /emulation/, the latter 64bit.
>>>
>>> But only qemu-kvm uses virtualization.
>>>
>>> Try also to kick off your images using virt-manager.  It's usually
>>> fairly simple to configure new VMs that way, and just point it to your
>>> images.  This way, virt-manager/libvirtd will take care of setting up
>>> the proper arguments to qemu-kvm, for better performance.  Also try to
>>> use the virtio drivers wherever possible, as they don't require the
>>> complete hardware emulation layer.
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> kind regards,
>>>
>>> David Sommerseth
>>>
>>>
>
>