Goal: Emulate a Raspberry Pi with QEMU in order to run the Raspbian O/S (based on Debian Linux).
The current setup is not ideal. For one thing, the maximum RAM allowed using the "versatile-pb" firmware is 256 Mb. In addition, only the most basic peripherals, a keyboard and mouse, are supported.
A number of articles have been written on this topic. Most are outdated, and the few recent ones are missing key information.