Comment 1 for bug 522292

I suspect something is wrong before qemu-kvm is involved.

I just verified that I can do the following on 'mabolo':

=== go.sh ===
tmpd=$PWD/t
mkdir ${tmpd}
qemu-img create -f qcow2 "${tmpd}/disk" 1G

LC_ALL=C PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/bin /usr/bin/kvm -M pc-0.12 -enable-kvm -m 512 -smp 2 -name i-4EC209E0 -uuid a4315a8f-5c7c-ca4c-f158-4139e1663fd9 -nographic -chardev socket,id=monitor,path=${tmpd}/i-4EC209E0.monitor,server,nowait -monitor chardev:monitor -boot c -kernel ${1} -append "root=/dev/sda1 console=ttyS0" -drive file=${tmpd}/disk,if=scsi,index=0,boot=on -net nic,macaddr=d0:0d:4e:c2:09:e0,vlan=0,model=e1000,name=e1000.0 -net tap,fd=65,vlan=0,name=tap.0 -parallel none -usb -serial stdio

=== end go.sh ===

The differences in the command above are really only in where the monitor and are directed. With the above, kvm will successfully load the kernel and panic with "cant find root" (because there is no root in the newly created disk image).

I tested above with kernel lucid-server-uec-amd64-vmlinuz-virtual.20100216