So enableing the printks causes the emulator to hang. Interesting. This seems to suggest there may be some sort of subtle timing problem. With the printks it should run painfully slow but it should not hang? printk generate IO to the serial port. I wonder if that is some how messing it up.
Could it be a interrupt problem between the vga device and the serial port ?
This board is highly integrated, and after a successful boot, I have got sometimes a kernel panic with a non-syncing interrupt handler. Furthermore the vga device is located with interrupt 0 under lspci.
Ok, it is theory only :D
chris