After running quite a few tests with different configurations and doing also some manual testing, I am finding out that more or less the main factor in performance of KVM versus native is the disk IO. In particular, the schedulilng on both host and guest seems to have a significant effect. What it looks like is even that, contrary to wisdom and rationale on the internet, it is not more efficient to use noop as scheduler for IO in the guest.
Unfortunately though I had to fix an issue in the VMs related to disk partitioning and I am now not 100% sure anymore of the settings that I used to run the tests. So I need to rerun tests and it is also time for a more systematic approach now that I have preliminaray results. In fact, I will now automate the entire testing even further so I can run multiple configurations sequentially and also verify a larger number of combinations.
To be continued.
Looking at the numbers it could be that I arrive at a different conclusion. Will run new tests overnight.