+By far the most common problem is with broken or incompatible
+qemu releases.
+
+Different versions of qemu have problems booting the appliance for
+different reasons. This varies between versions of qemu, and Linux
+distributions which add their own patches.
+
+If you find a problem, you could try using your own qemu built from
+source (qemu is very easy to build from source), with a 'qemu
+wrapper'. Qemu wrappers are described in the guestfs(3) manpage.
+
+
+Note on using KVM
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+By default the configure script will look for qemu-kvm (KVM support).
+You will need a reasonably recent processor for this to work. KVM is
+much faster than using plain Qemu.
+
+You may also need to enable KVM support for non-root users, by following
+these instructions:
+
+ http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/FAQ#How_can_I_use_kvm_with_a_non-privileged_user.3F
+
+On some systems, this will work too:
+
+ chmod o+rw /dev/kvm
+
+On some systems, the chmod will not survive a reboot, and you will
+need to make edits to the udev configuration.
+
+
+vmchannel
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Previous versions of libguestfs required something called "vmchannel".
+Vmchannel is a special device given to virtual machines which allows
+them to communicate in some way with the host, often (but not always)
+without using a traditional network device. In reality, there is no
+one thing called "vmchannel". This idea has been reimplemented
+several times under the name vmchannel, and other hypervisors have
+their own incompatible implementation(s) too.
+
+In libguestfs <= 1.0.71, we required a specific vmchannel which is
+properly known as "guestfwd" and has been upstream in qemu since here:
+
+ http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-02/msg01042.html
+
+In libguestfs >= 1.0.71 we don't require any vmchannel implementation,
+as long as qemu has been compiled with support for SLIRP (user mode
+networking, or "-net user"), which is almost always the case.
+
+In libguestfs >= 1.5.4 we switched again to using qemu's virtio-serial
+and removed all the other vmchannels and the SLIRP channel.
+
+
+Supermin appliance
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+In libguestfs >= 1.7.19 the supermin appliance is the default and only
+supported form of appliance. For more information see febootstrap
+(http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/febootstrap/).
+
+
+Mirroring tip
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+On my machines I can usually rebuild the appliance in around 3
+minutes. If it takes much longer for you, use a local distro mirror
+or squid.
+
+To use squid to cache yum downloads, read this first:
+https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/yum/2006-August/009041.html
+(In brief, because yum chooses random mirrors each time, squid doesn't
+work very well with default yum configuration. To get around this,
+choose a Fedora mirror which is close to you, set this with
+'./configure --with-mirror=[...]', and then proxy the whole lot
+through squid by setting http_proxy environment variable).
+
+You will also need to substantially increase the squid configuration
+limits:
+http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Using_Mock_to_test_package_builds#Using_Squid_to_Speed_Up_Mock_package_downloads
+
+
+Porting to other Linux distros / non-Linux
+----------------------------------------------------------------------