I've had a go with running the QEMU release candidate. Short story is that it boots to a prompt against the 11.05 alpha2 release so I'm happy.
It was a messy road so I've written up my train of though here: https://wiki.linaro.org/MichaelHope/Sandbox/QEMU
Note that if you follow the instructions on: https://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/GettingInstallingTesting
and turn on a swap file then it halts during boot.
-- Michael