Proxmox/KVM/qemu: Fix unexpected CPU load caused by idle VMs

Publication date: 2020-05-01

Issue: 4-5% CPU load on Proxmox host for each KVM/qemu VM with idle Debian guest

This undesirable behavior becomes especially troubling in case many VMs shall be run on the host.

Solution: Change machine type from i440fx (default) to q35.

This solved the issue. Other solutions shown in forums (disabling ballooning device; changing to virtio SCSI adapter, disabling tablet pointing device) did not help in my case.