qemu on ARM hosts can't boot i386 image

If you apply some workarounds for bug 870990, bug 883133 and bug 883136 QEMU still cannot boot the i386 debian_squeeze_i386_standard.qcow2 image from http://people.debian.org/~aurel32/qemu/i386/ -- grub starts to boot but something causes the system to reset just before display of the blue-background grub menu, so we go round in a loop forever. This image boots OK on i386 hosted qemu so this indicates some kind of ARM-host specific bug.