Yeah, Dominique, your wiki was one of the many docs I read through before/during/after starting down this primrose path... thanks for writing it. I'm an Arch user, and I couldn't find anything to indicate qemu, as its compiled for Arch, will look in /etc/default/qemu-kvm. And now that I've got the right page size, the instances are starting...
The reason I want to use the page element to the hugepages directive is that I want to target a numa node directly - in other words, I like the idea of one VM running on Node 0, and the other running on Node 2.
Your comment about libvirt taking care of the hugepages mount isn't consistent with my reading or experience - on a systemd-based system, systemd takes care of the hugetlbfs mount to /dev/hugepages, and the libvirt builds the /dev/hugepages/qemu... directory structure. At least that's what I've seen.
-rb