We show that a class of quantum computations that was recently shown to be efficiently simulatable on a classical computer by Valiant [in Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (2001), p. 114] corresponds to a physical model of noninteracting fermions in one dimension. We give an alternative proof of his result using the language of fermions and extend the result to noninteracting fermions with arbitrary pairwise interactions, where gates can be conditioned on outcomes of complete von Neumann measurements in the computational basis on other fermionic modes in the circuit. This last result is in remarkable contrast with the case of noninteracting bosons where universal quantum computation can be achieved by allowing gates to be conditioned on classical bits [E. Knill, R. Laflamme, and G. Milburn, Nature (London) 409, 46 (2001)].