Comment 6 for bug 1720397

Hmm, indeed.

This might have been broken by the transition to a systemd service:
In newer versions that is:
$ service qemu-kvm status
● qemu-kvm.service - QEMU KVM preparation - module, ksm, hugepages
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/qemu-kvm.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead)

From:
$ dpkg -S /lib/systemd/system/qemu-kvm.service
qemu-system-common: /lib/systemd/system/qemu-kvm.service

And particularly interesting is the default:
$ systemctl is-enabled qemu-kvm.service
disabled

While the older sysV script was handled by the compatibility generators, and became
$ service qemu-kvm status
● qemu-kvm.service - LSB: QEMU KVM module loading script
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/qemu-kvm; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (exited) since Mi 2017-09-20 16:17:44 UTC; 2 weeks 6 days ago

$ systemctl is-enabled qemu-kvm.service
qemu-kvm.service is not a native service, redirecting to systemd-sysv-install
Executing /lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install is-enabled qemu-kvm
enabled

This seems to have been changes in zesty already (qemu 2.8) and thereby Ubuntu Cloud Archive Ocata as well (Which I assume you use given you see that issue on kernel 4.4).
In that case I wonder why not more are seeing this issue - never the less it should be fixed.