Yay, problem self-solved!
I have two identical machines with exactly the same CentOS 5.4 kickstarted
from the same sources, and the same packages installed. Their cpuinfos are
identical, and they are running libvirt 0.6.3 with the very same
libvirtd.conf.
Turns out permissions on /dev/kvm have to be root:kvm, not root:root.
For some reason this automagically happened on one install but not the
other. Any idea why?
Ah well.
--Claude