Posted upthread but it's important enough to repeat:
> qemu
Don't.
I developed a from-scratch operating system as part of my PhD thesis. We initially ran it on qemu due to its speed and simplicity, but the truth is that while qemu would run something developed for real hardware, it would also run a lot more. What it accepted was very, very loose and when you developed for qemu, you generally couldn't take it and run it on real hardware without days worth of debugging and trying to figure out where qemu did things just a little more loosely than actual hardware did.
We ended up using Bochs for that purpose, which is a lot slower but a lot more faithful (and unfortunately lacks a lot of secondary hardware that's important, but it will take you a long time in development before you hit that particular limitation).
> qemu
Don't.
I developed a from-scratch operating system as part of my PhD thesis. We initially ran it on qemu due to its speed and simplicity, but the truth is that while qemu would run something developed for real hardware, it would also run a lot more. What it accepted was very, very loose and when you developed for qemu, you generally couldn't take it and run it on real hardware without days worth of debugging and trying to figure out where qemu did things just a little more loosely than actual hardware did.
We ended up using Bochs for that purpose, which is a lot slower but a lot more faithful (and unfortunately lacks a lot of secondary hardware that's important, but it will take you a long time in development before you hit that particular limitation).