This issue was originally opened by @myllynen in hashicorp/packer#11839 and has been migrated to this repository. The original issue description is below.

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Description of the Issue

When trying to create a RHEL 9 VM with Packer + Qemu builder running on RHEL 7.9, the installer fails due to kernel panic. See the screenshot at the below mentioned other report. The relevant part of qemu-kvm command line is:

/usr/libexec/qemu-kvm -m 4096M ... -machine type=pc,accel=kvm -smp cpus=2,sockets=2

If configuring Packer to add "-cpu host" to qemu-kvm command line then the installer starts normally. Another user reported the same issue elsewhere and fixed this slightly differently: https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/packer-qemu-kvm-redhat-9-kernel-panic/39886.

I'm not sure what's the root cause for this so I'm filing the issue for both Red Hat and Packer, hopefully either or both sides can be tweaked to fix this issue. Thanks.

Version information:
RHEL 9.0 / Packer 1.8.1