BTW, I've installed stretch i386 chroot and installed qemu-system-x86 on it. qemu-system-i386 works just fine here. Become curious, installed 32bit kernel too - the same, qemu-system-i386 works just fine.
So I *guess* your issue has something to do with your host CPU too, -- Core2duo is quite old and lacks several kvm-related features found on modern CPUs (eg, nested page tables), - without these, some old and quite complex code paths in qemu and kernel are being executed. Probably bit-rotted too, but here, I definitely can't help you, since I just don't have that hardware and there's no where I can get it. Thanks, /mjt
