Comment 2 for bug 732223

I found a pathological use case with debian-installer; as soon as one tries to partition the SD card, QEMU hangs and doesn't seem to return. If it's pre-partitioned, if one tries to mkfs.ext4 it, it hangs at 33% of a 512 MiB disk with a single primary partition and takes an awful amount of time to continue from the 33% mark.

To reproduce, create a 512 MiB sd.img file, download files from http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/oneiric/main/installer-armel/current/images/linaro-vexpress/netboot/ and run:
qemu-system-arm -M vexpress-a9 -kernel vmlinuz -initrd initrd.gz -append "foo" -m 1024 -sd sd.img

when partitioning, select to partition manually and use the first partition as /; don't setup any swap.