[luch]

It's actually pretty standard to fork QEMU when you want to emulate a custom kernel/board. QEMU is a good common emulation platform, but in no way it can emulate correctly every quirks of a custom pci or even PIC device expected by the system.

[greatgib]

I'm not expert in QEMU, but to my understanding, it would make sense to fork QEMU to support a new hardware/board/platform, but not so much to support a new "software"/"firmware" on top of an already existing and used board platform.