Libvirt git isn't correctly starting plain qemu guests when using qemu-kvm 1.2 (on Fedora 18). The problem is that -no-kvm is not passed to the binary, so the default mode is used, which is kvm=enabled. The issue comes from capabilities probing: we probe against 'qemu-kvm -M none', which responds to 'query-kvm' with enabled=False, when regular invocation is enabled=True. We should be able to work around this by using -machine ...,accel=kvm|tcg unconditionally for qemu >= 1.2, and not have to do the -enable-kvm/-no-kvm dance. accel= has been around for a while and libguestfs uses it so it should be reliable. - Cole