This tutorial is inspired by errors and fixes we encountered when testing openSUSE Leap 16 yesterday. The problem is a kernel panic at boot time, so we cannot run it the same way we usually run other GNU/Linux operating systems up to today. After looking up and re-reading our old articles, we found out a solution. We hope you can run Leap 16 on a virtual machine quickly and easily with this. Now let's start reading and practicing!

 (A QEMU virtual machine showing openSUSE bootloader with Install Leap 16.0 as an option highlighted in light green)

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Identifying The Problem

We got a consistent error message saying, among all of them, "kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! [...]" every time we run openSUSE Leap 16 virtually on our workstation Ubuntu 24.04 using QEMU-KVM virtual machine software. To be precise, we boot it up, openSUSE bootloader showing, we choose Install Leap 16, then boot up again and kernel panic. We used the same command line as with any other GNU/Linux image we have, while others worked successfully, only Leap 16 failed. 

The command line used is: 

$ sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2G -cdrom Leap-16.0.iso

Meaning: 

$ : the command is done in normal user mode. 

sudo : the command asks to be done in super user mode for 15 minutes. 

qemu-system-x86_64 : the actual command line of QEMU computer emulator. This version is intended for PC 64-bit aka x86_64. 

-m 2G : we give 2GB as memory to this virtual machine. 

-cdrom Leap-16.0.iso : we run QEMU in cdrom mode to read an ISO file.   

(QEMU window showing a virtual machine running Leap 16 with a black screen, a lot of text message and a kernel panic)   

**** 

Expected and Actual Result

It is expected that Leap 16 boots successfully and we should see "Installer" showing on screen with buttons we could click to proceed further. 

However, actual result showing Leap 16 failed to boot with a black screen kernel panic message. No Installer, no further installation process we can do.

**** 

Identifying the Cause of Problem

After reading, we found out that openSUSE officially states that now Leap users should check their computer to meet the microarchitecture x86-64-v2 minimum requirement before using Leap. Otherwise, Leap will not boot nor work. To be clear, our old laptop ThinkPad T430 with Intel Core i5 Gen. III supports this requirement just fine. However, QEMU-KVM command line used above does not meet the requirement so the booting was failed. 

(openSUSE Wiki web page X86-64 microarchitecture levels explaining this change happens and the reasons and a list of supported processors)

**** 

Running Leap 16 in Virtual Machine Correctly 

We managed to boot openSUSE Leap 16 successfully in a QEMU-KVM virtual machine by changing the above command line into a new one below: 

$  sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cpu host -smp 2 -m 2G -cdrom Leap-16.0.iso

Where: 

-enable-kvm : enables Kernel Virtual Machine technology required by -cpu host option.

-cpu host : enables the physical CPU of our laptop to be the CPU of the virtual machine instead of a virtual one. This requires -enable-kvm option.  

-smp 2 : (optional) gives 2 cores of CPU to this virtual machine simply to make the computing faster. The more the better as long as it doesn't slow down your host system. This is not required to solve our case.

(QEMU window showing a dark green openSUSE bootloader with a pointer selecting Install Leap 16.0 option with light green highlight)

 (QEMU window showing openSUSE Leap 16 installer with two choices Leap 16.0 and openSUSE Leap Micro 6.2. To this point, it is a success!)