This is a writeup about how to install Ubuntu 16.04.1 Xenial Xerus for the 32-bit hard-float ARMv7 (armhf) architecture on a Qemu VM via Ubuntu netboot.
The setup will create a Ubuntu VM with LPAE extensions (generic-lpae) enabled. However, this writeup should also work for non-LPAE (generic) kernels.
The performance of the resulting VM is quite good, and it allows VMs with >1G ram (compared to 256M on versatilepb and 1G on versatile-a9/versatile-a15). It also supports virtio disks whereas versatile-a9/versatile-a15 only support SD cards via the -sd argument.