There are projects doing that althought qemu is the de facto standard and best bet if you don't need to boot your machines in 20ms
> Can you do libvirt stuff without QEMU?
Libvirt have many backends so yes. IIRC it can even manage virtualbox, althought I'm, not sure why anyone would want to
> Hoping the answers to both aren't useless/"technically, but why would you want to?"
...why? Is there a problem kvm+qemu+libvirt doesn't solve for you?