Hi,
we've also had two reports about issues with 32-bit guests now[0][1] (both had '-m 4096' in the QEMU commandline), which I was able to reproduce with a 32-bit Debian 12.6 install, so nothing ancient ;) The QEMU commandline is below[2].
Unfortunately, it still fails to boot, even with the "limit address space used for pci devices, part two" patch applied on top of rel-1.16.3 (and using current QEMU master).
Reproduces here. Seems there is something seriously wrong in that debian kernel.
Even when going for 36 phys bits (-cpu host,host-phys-bits-limit=36), which is the physical address space of PAE mode when it was introduced by the pentium pro, the guest fails to boot. That *really* should not happen.
I guess what you are seeing here is i386 support in the linux kernel starting to bitrot due to everybody moving to 64-bit ...
take care, Gerd