Comment 1 for bug 287533

Problem is due to this code in qemudGetMaxVCPUs() from qemu_driver.c of libvirt:
    /* XXX future KVM will support SMP. Need to probe
       kernel to figure out KVM module version i guess */
    if (STRCASEEQ(type, "kvm"))
        return 1;

Apparently, kvm in hardy and intrepid can do vcpus up to 16. As a workaround, I hacked a small patch to /usr/share/pyshared/virtinst/util.py:

--- ./util.py.orig 2008-10-22 09:54:01.000000000 -0500
+++ util.py 2008-10-22 10:03:09.000000000 -0500
@@ -220,7 +220,11 @@
     if type is None:
         type = conn.getType()
     try:
- max = conn.getMaxVcpus(type.lower())
+ # workaround for LP: #287533
+ if type == "kvm":
+ max = 16
+ else:
+ max = conn.getMaxVcpus(type.lower())
     except libvirt.libvirtError:
         max = 32
     return max

While this is very likely not the patch we should include, it does allow my to use virt-manager and virt-install for intrepid ISO testing with multiple VCPUs.