Issues with modprobing and modloading to run Qemu

Issues & Assistance
1

I’ve been trying to get this fixed for a while, and troubleshooting led me here. I forget how I got down this rabbit hole, all I remember is the following. Basically, I found myself on the Arch Wiki because I can’t get Qemu to run. According to the wiki article, I should use lsmod to check if it will work. It instructs me if kvm returns text while kvm-amd does not, it is either a hardware issue that can be fixed in BIOS (which I was able to do with the help of a vir/g/in, the following response from the command line was after this fix) or an issue with modloading which must be done manually. Here is the response to modprobing kvm:

❯ lsmod | grep kvm
kvm_amd               270336  0
kvm                  1593344  1 kvm_amd
irqbypass              16384  1 kvm
ccp                   245760  1 kvm_amd

I already checked if Qemu will work despite not getting a response from kvm-amd; It does not so I have reason to believe if I can get kvm-amd to respond then it will actually work. The reason I am not using a simpler VM software like VirtualBox is because I need the customization Qemu offers so I can run an old computerized sewing machine through software only compatible with Windows 7 (Wine is unable to run the program). I am not a computer person by any means and I’m too lazy to distrohop since Cachy has treated me pretty well as far as transitioning to a new OS goes. Lord knows if I had a somewhat similar issue with Windoze I would never get the sort of help I’ve gotten so far using an Arch fork. Thank you all in advance for the help and thank you to the dev team for such a great OS.

2

Hello and welcome,

In order for this to be as simple as possible I will outline a minimal setup.

Install things (and be refreshed/synced/up-to-date);

sudo pacman -Syu qemu-desktop virt-manager

Add user to group;

sudo usermod -aG libvirt $USER

Afterwards you can start/enable the socket or service;

systemctl enable --now libvirtd.socket

And “Virtual Machine Manager” should then work.

3

It still does not want to work. Even with your advice, I’m getting the same error when trying to run VirtManager (see attached). Modprobing kvm-amd still returns nothing. Maybe it’s something else, I don’t know. Could be the wrong iso or I failed setup in some other way.

Screenshot_20260522_202258
Screenshot_20260522_2022581282×618 27.4 KB

4

That looks like things are working … else you would not even be able to start a ‘machine’.

But its failing to do anything because “No bootable device”.
The question now is how is that configured?
What are we trying to boot?

5

I was using this video as a guide to get Windows 7 running. I also looked at other guides on YT to no avail, they all seem to be able to get this running with no hint as to what I did wrong while setting it up.

6

OK at the very beginning (after :plus:) ;

https://imgur.com/X4bArXJ

After selecting ISO mode as above, did you then select the ISO here;

https://imgur.com/QSx5uSG

Though in your case with a windoze ISO you can likely allow the ‘automatic’ mode in the bottom entry box.. if not then search+apply win7 there.

( Also can we be sure the ISO is good? )

The next steps are setting the resources;

https://imgur.com/gHjWuFR

Including storage that can be made on-the0fly;

https://imgur.com/UvCDffg

7

That is exactly what I did. The ISO I found was from the website listed on the video, “fedorapeople.org” which, at first glance, appears to be a vetted repository.

8

So with that info and going through the first few minutes of the video ..

Are you trying to boot that virtio ISO in the first place?

The video actually shows selecting a real/full win7 iso first - such as in the example pics showed last comment - and will be booting that.

After those selections and dropping to the ‘customize’ part they then go on to add an extra CDROM with the virtio ISO to do that stuff extra.

But please verify you are first using a win7 ISO as the ‘base’ - and that it can reasonably be assumed to work as well.

(As you did not disclose any source for that.)

9

Upon further examination, the ISO I used is the “virtio drivers”. That’s probably been the issue the whole time since I thought that was the OS itself. I’ll have to figure out how to find a copy of Windows 7 in the Year of our Lord 2026. Thank you for the assistance; however, this process just got a whole lot harder.

10

Well luckily the ISOs themselves are free.

Its just the license that may be different.

I would go looking through archive.org and find an ISO then verify its checksums.

Something like;

( https://archive.org/download/windows-iso-collection-flutter/Windows%207/SP1/Windows_7_Ultimate_x64_EN.iso )

And verify it using sha256sum or whatever else;

11

I think the only remaining issue is getting the VM connected to the internet. I am able to get the license working so now I’m parsing through guides to set up a TAP through a switch.