You’ve probably found an endless supply of URLs where people complain that they can’t get anything to boot with qemu-system-ppc and many supposed guides to follow that work. It’s almost impossible to find functional examples of how to run qemu-system-ppc without a kernel panic, core dump, or ending up in bios limbo. So here’s one way I came up with that works for me.

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer. When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine architecture on a different machine architecture. This is different than VMware, VirtualBox, or Hyper-V where you’re running different operating systems on the same architecture.