DeviceAllow= only grants cgroup permission to open a device node - it doesn't create one, and nspawn can't mknod a device inside a user namespace. The node needs an explicit bind from the host as well, so both are required together. Also add a test that actually boots qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm (no disk, killed by timeout) and checks for "Permission denied" / "Could not access KVM" in its output, rather than just checking the node opens - a wrong-gid or unmapped node still opens but fails the ioctls qemu needs. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Dzy7tEKLCFFXD96LmR8we3