The qxl device in qemu-kvm does not work with the default VRAM size. There are some comments about this on the qemu mailing list. It seems that SeaBIOS upstream has fixed this, but the QEMU developers did not want to pull the fix into the tree so soon before the QEMU 0.15 release: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu/112294 Other distributions have patched their seabios packages to fix this. Gentoo ships SeaBIOS as part of qemu-kvm, which makes this difficult to patch. I filed bug #387319 for that issue. Ubuntu patched this using the Fedora patch: https://launchpad.net/~bderzhavets/+archive/seabios62/+packages The Fedora patch is available here: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/virt-maint/2011-July/002584.html I am not familiar enough with how qemu-kvm works to be able to patch it using the Fedora patch. Could someone else look into this?
I worked around this issue on my system by replacing /usr/share/qemu/bios.bin with its Ubuntu counterpart. The original file has a timestamp in august despite qemu-kvm being rebuilt today, so I assume the build system fetched it from the internet. Unless the maintainer wants to fetch the Ubuntu file, it might be a good idea to set this bug to depend on bug #387319, but I leave that to the maintainer.
There's a plan to switch to sys-apps/seabios which is in the tree.
Fixed in qemu-kvm-0.15.1.
