Andreas,
Thank you for the reply.
Without the QEMU command line and a link to the FreeBSD .iso that's rather hard... "above 32-bit boundary" sounds like ppc64, but the PowerPC,750 (G3) is 32-bit only. Could be some QEMU guest vs. host bitness issue, or just the bootloader going haywire due to bugs in OpenBIOS.
I gave the command line in the original posting, but something chopped it. Let me cut 'n' paste again. If it still fails to come through, everything is logged at https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/623852
"Has anyone tried booting FreeBSD8.1-ppc under QEMU (Linux x86_64 host; PPC guest)? I can get Linux/PPC to run fine, and FreeBSD8.1-i386 as well; but there seems to be a problem with whatever the FreeBSD8.1 kernel does, that QEMU's PPC emulation can't handle.
I am using the latest version of QEMU from GIT as of 25/8/10. I don't know how to get a "git commit hash", so I can't quote it.
The kernel starts OK then loops after "Kernel entry at 0x100100 ...".
The command I am running is
qemu-system-ppc -cdrom FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-powerpc-disc1.iso -hda freebsd8.1-ppc -m 94 -boot d
I obtained the kernel from ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/powerpc/ISO-IMAGES/8.1/FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-powerpc-disc1.iso ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/powerpc/ISO-IMAGES/8.1/FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-powerpc-disc1.iso."
Regards,
-Nigel