Using Q 0.9.0d88 on a Mac OS X i386 host I was able to boot into debian-40r0-sparc-netinst.iso with qemu-system-sparc, have the NIC configured through DHCP and install to about 73% where I repeatedly got a kernel panic "Aiee".
I should add that when I tried the interrupt checking patch proposed on this list (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2007-03/ msg00153.html) then instead of the kernel panic I got a qemu crash.
Andreas
