Emulation failure on booting/rebooting VMs

[Mohammed Gamal]

Hi,
I've been sporadically getting my KVM virtual machines crashing with this
message while they're booting

KVM internal error. Suberror: 1
emulation failure
EAX=00000000 EBX=00000000 ECX=00000000 EDX=00600f12
ESI=00000000 EDI=00000000 EBP=00000000 ESP=0000fffa
EIP=0000ff53 EFL=00000006 [-----P-] CPL=0 II=0 A20=1 SMM=0 HLT=0
ES =0000 00000000 0000ffff 00009300
CS =f000 000f0000 0000ffff 00009b00
SS =0000 00000000 0000ffff 00009200
DS =0000 00000000 0000ffff 00009300
FS =0000 00000000 0000ffff 00009300
GS =0000 00000000 0000ffff 00009300
LDT=0000 00000000 0000ffff 00008200
TR =0000 00000000 0000ffff 00008300
GDT=     00000000 0000ffff
IDT=     00000000 0000ffff
CR0=60000010 CR2=00000000 CR3=00000000 CR4=00000000
DR0=0000000000000000 DR1=0000000000000000 DR2=0000000000000000
DR3=0000000000000000
DR6=00000000ffff0ff0 DR7=0000000000000400
EFER=0000000000000000
Code=74 65 61 6d 2e 00 66 68 5f 55 00 00 e9 c3 f8 fb f4 cb 66 c3 <cf> 66 68
ff e6 00 00 e9 8b b1 66 55 66 57 66 56 66 53 66 89 c1 66 89 d6 a8 07 75 23
66 0f

I am running qemu 1.2, seabios 1.7.3 and ipxe (1.0.0-f6840ba) and the host
CPU is AMD Opteron 6386 SE running kernel 3.4.71.

I digged a little into the kvm kernel module code and I can trace these
emulation failures only to either a call to pf_interception() - which is
highly unlikely since the machine doesn't appear to have setup paging yet -
and task_switch_interception(). I am suspecting that ipxe or seabios might
be executing some invalid code or something, since this failure only
appears sporadically and is not 100% reproducible. Any ideas why this might
be happening?

Regards,
Mohammed