Ah, good question! I found an image and instructions at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/HowToQemu#Using_QEMU_without_libvirt
that was a bit easier to work through, and sure enough, it works on
Linux but not on OS X.
Linux precise64 3.2.0-37-generic:
vagrant@precise64:/opt/qemu-ima
Public bug reported:
Both from release 2.1.2 and built from a recent source, qemu-system-arm
seems to hang immediately after starting up, never getting to the point
of actually booting.
I've tried qemu-system-mipsel with another image and it worked fine, so
this seems to be specific to the ARM ru