cpu feature selection is not affected to guest 's cpuid with whpx On windows with -accel whpx, "-cpu" is ignored without any messages. Guest recognizes features as same as host's. Confirmed on v5.2.0-rc1. I suggest qemu may do, - Warn with incompatible -cpu options were given. - Enhance cpuid handling. Background: I was investigated mmio and block copy issue in Linux kernel. I met a problem that Linux went ill for touching mmio with whpx. (not with tcg) I suspect erms(enhanced rep movs) might trigger. I tried to mask erms on qemu with -feature,erms, but it was ineffective. At last, I disabled erms manually, to tweak whpx-all.c to mask erms in cpuid. FYI, qemu with whpx from/to mmio, "rep movsb" does byte access regardless of erms. Linux kernel tends to choose not "rep movsq" but "rep movsb" with erms.