solve kvm soft lockup

Update: setting to jiffies on my guest seems to be the most stable (no lockups yet in the last 24 hours) Original Post: I googled around and by adding clocksource=jiffies to my kernel i fixed it. Instead of jiffies you could also try "pit". This is for the guest OS. You can also use kvm-clock if that is available to you. To check, run the following commands and see whether kvm-clock is available # cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/available_clocksource tsc hpet acpi_pm jiffies # cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource tsc

Some people say that the best option for a precise clock on the guest is to use the kvm-clock source (pvclock) which is synchronized with clock's host.

There are also reports of disabling C-states in the BIOS.