There's more...

As an alternative to directly running the qemu-system-* commands, on Ubuntu systems there's the qemu-kvm package that provides the /usr/bin/kvm binary. This file is a wrapper to the qemu-system-x86_64 command, and it passes the -enable-kvm parameter to it automatically. 

To install the package and use the kvm command instead, run the following:

root@kvm:~# apt install qemu-kvm
...
root@kvm:~# kvm -name debian -vnc 146.20.141.254:0 -cpu Nehalem -m 1024 -drive format=raw,index=2,file=debian.img -daemonize
root@kvm:~# pgrep -lfa qemu
25343 qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -name debian -vnc 146.20.141.254:0 -cpu Nehalem -m 1024 -drive format=raw,index=2,file=debian.img -daemonize
root@kvm:~#

You might have noted that starting and stopping QEMU/KVM instances is somewhat of a manual process, especially having to kill the instance process in order to stop it. In Chapter 2, Using libvirt to Manage KVM, we are going to walk you through a set of recipes that will make managing the life cycle of KVM virtual machines much easier, with the userspace tools that the libvirt package provides.