No, none of those people are using a kernel built for the rpi, because that simply won't work. They will be using a kernel for versatilepb (or some random hacked variant on it) plus the rpi filesystem image. This is all a bit less than fully supported because the versatilepb board doesn't actually have an 1176 CPU so when you say '-cpu arm1176' you're making qemu emulate something that never existed, and whether Linux works on that or not is a bit up to luck.
In general for troubleshooting you need to follow the same process you would do for bringing up a kernel on real hardware devboards. This typically involves using a debugger, looking at where the kernel has fallen over and making some educated guesswork about what kernel config options might need tweaking. For this particular case you'll probably be better off asking in raspberry pi forums or other places where the people who've already done what you're trying to do hang out. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1231093 Title: qemu-system-arm does nothing but spin wheels Status in QEMU: Invalid Bug description: This was using 1.0.1 on fedora 17 then using 1.6.0 built from source with default configuration. The host machine is x86_64 (intel i5) with a custom 3.11 kernel. 'qemu-system-x86_64 -kernel [hostkernel]' Opens a window and shows the kernel booting. 'qemu-system-x86_64 -kernel [arm11v6 kernel]' Opens a window with garbage in it. 'qemu-system-arm -cpu arm1176 -M versatilepb -kernel [arm11v6 kernel]' Opens a window where nothing ever appears. This kernel runs on a raspberry pi, so arm1176 should be appropriate; the '-M' option I noticed online. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1231093/+subscriptions