Some days ago I was in desperate need to run Raspberry Pi on my Ubuntu. As you might expect, there has been several others with similar need and i quickly ran to a number of blog posts explaining how to do this with QEMU. Maybe the best I could find is at http://paulscott.co.za/blog/full-raspberry-pi-raspbian-emulation-with-qemu/.

However, all these documents had a similar drawback. For some reason you cannot just make QEMU to boot from the Raspbian image file but you need a kernel file (often referred as kernel-qemu) which is given with -kernel parameter to QEMU. All these blogs pointed at currently no-existing blog at xecdesign.com and did not explain where this magical kernel file came from.

It appears that you have to do apply a number of patches (armhf? qemu?) to stock kernel to make it boot in QEMU. Of yourse, you have to cross-compile the kernel to ARM.

Finally I found the kernel-qemu inside the pre-packaged QEMU+Raspbian Windows installation at sourceforge. If you just need the kernel-qemu, go ahead and download it. This is probably the one that origins from xecdesign.com. There is another alternative (http://elinux.org/File:ZImage.7z) which gives you 3.6.1 kernel (download).

However, both the two have same drawback. You don’t get modules and they lack some important modules. For example the USB stack does not work.