I looked at this matter a bit more. I switched from sdl1 to gtk3 and enabled gl and virglrenderer. It works.
But now, we're facing quite an.. interesting issue. On all my servers where qemu is used, upgrading to this new version pulls in a TON of new dependencies, including wayland (libwayland-SERVER too), dconf-service, gnome icon themes, all mesa and drm libs and other things. Very similar thing happens when I just switch sdl1 to sdl2, but in this case it does not pull that many gnome things, still depending on all drm and wayland libs. Once we enable that, all server people will start screaming out very very loud. We need to either make display modular (that'd be the best), with modules like qemu-system-display-gtk etc, or we need to create a headless package as a temporary measure. Now, we have various qemu-system-$ARCH packages, making a headless variant for all of them is just insane. Maybe single qemu-system-native-headless will do the trick, for most cases anyway (only on a few arches where this makes sense), I'm not sure. I can enable virglrenderer, but without sdl2 or gtk3 together with mesa it wont'd do any thing. Suggestions? :) Thanks, /mjt