> I vaguely recall someone telling me that the qemu source code is fairly readable [...]
That someone was either pranking you or knows a mysterious part of the qemu codebase that's unlike the rest of the criminally underdocumented qemu soup. Or my standards are too high.
The source is okay, the problem is that there's really no docs/examples for even the basic stuff. Do you want to boot from a virtual block device and PXE from a network drive ... well, maybe these 300 command line arguments in some random order will work. Eventually. Have fun. So reading the source is a big help in that. But it's not ideal. And libvirt/oVirt/etc are helpful, but not for just that quick and dirty "let's try something out with the linux kernel in qemu" thing.
That someone was either pranking you or knows a mysterious part of the qemu codebase that's unlike the rest of the criminally underdocumented qemu soup. Or my standards are too high.