Ok, so this is migration from qemu-kvm 1.1 to qemu 1.3. This officially does not work because the two uses different memory layout.
There is a way to make this work from old qemu-kvm to new qemu, by patching new qemu, but this introduces incompatibilities in other areas. Hopefully there will be no more "major" transitions like this in the future (I mean from qemu-kvm to qemu), so there's a chance that snapshots made with 1.3 and up will be forward-compatible. While this bugreport is filed with debian versions in mind, we in debian especially did not apply any changes to upstream qemu in this area, -- as history shows, any attempt to "fix" this "downstream" only makes things worse. ** Summary changed: - QEmu 1.3.90 cannot restore a 1.1.2 live snapshot + QEmu 1.3+ cannot restore a 1.1- live snapshot made in qemu-kvm -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1123975 Title: QEmu 1.3+ cannot restore a 1.1- live snapshot made in qemu-kvm Status in QEMU: Confirmed Bug description: I have upgraded to QEmu 1.3.90 (Debian 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp) but now when I try to restore a live snapshot made in QEmu 1.1.2 (Debian 1.1.2+dfsg-5) I get the following message: virsh # snapshot-revert fgtbbuild wtb error: operation failed: Error -22 while loading VM state I have test VMs with live snapshots coreresponding to different testing configurations. So I typically revert the VMs in one of the live snapshots and run the tests. It would be pretty annoying to have to recreate all these live snapshots any time I upgrade QEmu. ipxe-qemu 1.0.0+git-20120202.f6840ba-3 qemu 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp qemu-keymaps 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp qemu-kvm 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp qemu-system 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp qemu-system-arm 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp qemu-system-common 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp qemu-system-mips 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp qemu-system-misc 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp qemu-system-ppc 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp qemu-system-sparc 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp qemu-system-x86 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp qemu-user 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp qemu-utils 1.4.0~rc0+dfsg-1exp libvirt-bin 1.0.2-1 libvirt-dev 1.0.2-1 libvirt-doc 1.0.2-1 libvirt-glib-1.0-0 0.1.2-1 libvirt0 1.0.2-1 libvirtodbc0 6.1.4+dfsg1-5 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1123975/+subscriptions