To me this seems like Wind River's special sauce.

The CHANGELOG in meta-intel says this:

Added QEMU support.
-------------------
We now build several virtio drivers into the kernel by default, and
have qemuboot.conf files for intel-corei7-64 and intel-core2-32
targets. This allows one to do basic testing on meta-intel images
without having to use hardware. The virtio drivers are added via
KERNEL_FEATURES_INTEL_COMMON. This prevents them from being added to
custom kernels by default. They can be removed by adding the
following to a conf or kernel bbappend file:
  KERNEL_FEATURES_INTEL_COMMON_remove = “cfg/virtio.scc”
OVMF firmware is also built and can be used in order to emulate a UEFI
environment. A full runqemu command line for intel-corei7-64 could look
like this:
  runqemu core-image-minimal intel-corei7-64 wic ovmf

======

It's probably not too difficult to make this work in YP upstream (given that qemu is able to run desktop Linux distribution images aimed at real HW), but currently this isn't documented or (most importantly) tested on the AB.

Alex