A qemu bug seems possible, but unlikely. I have other kernels and initrd
gzipped cpio archivies that are very similar and run fine with qemu
versatile. The only difference here is the cpu is cortex-a8 but this
doesn't seem related to initrd processing.
I also took the initrd.gz and extracted it
Oh well, first guess was wrong. The kernel config is fine. The problem
is with qemu. The kernel became too big for qemu.
Edit the qemu file source file hw/arm_boot.c
Change this define to something bigger:
-#define INITRD_LOAD_ADDR 0x0080
+#define INITRD_LOAD_ADDR 0x00a0
Rebuild qemu
