Best way to pause KVM/QEMU windows guest
 

When I pause my guest using following
But the process qemu-system-x86_64 keeps taking about 30% of CPU (and this annoys be)

I am able to pause the guest by pausing the process with following command
this takes the CPU usage to 0, which is quite satisfying :) and I haven't seen any side affects of this approach till now.

So my question is, are there any problems I may run into using the later approach, like corruption of the guest.

Also why doesn't the actual suspend command actually suspends everything about the guest.

sigstop is the right signal to stop (hang) a process (that does not mean to terminate and/or kill it) and sigcont is used to allow to run it again. That will not corrupt anything, but keep in mind stopped processes are unresponsive (so cannot react on keyboard-mouse event for example).

qemu-system-x86_64 is the kvm process itself, that is not a guest, you cannot suspend it by virsh suspend. Also I think stopping that process will hang all the guests (if I remember well)

Thanks pan64, that is very good to know. Now the question remains what is the kvm process doing when to take 30% CPU even when there is no guest running.