QEMU KVM acceleration on aarch64 is disabled by default even though it seems to be working
Author: malte-vCreated Jul 24, 2026Updated Jul 30, 2026
I was wondering why everything was so slow in QEMU on my M2 Macbook Air running the asahi branch Linux kernel, then I found this in run.py:
# FIXME: Booting with KVM on aarch64 is broken, so disable it for now.
# FIXME: QEMU on Windows on ARM does not support WHPX yet
if config.virtualization_support and config.qemu_kind != QEMUKind.MacOS and config.architecture == Arch.Aarch64:
config.virtualization_support = FalseCommenting out these lines, I found that the system boots up just fine and is obviously much snappier than under software emulation. Just posting this in case the issue has been resolved. In case it's still broken on other systems, I think it would be good to at least print a message that KVM acceleration is disabled on purpose.
Source: SerenityOS/serenity