This little documentation explains how to build a kernel and a rootfs for qemu with sh4 architecture. 1) Select qemu sh4 configuration and compile it : make sh4_defconfig make all 2) Run qemu-system-sh4 with the kernel and rootfs previously generated It's recommended to use a git release for qemu (the current stable version has framebuffer display issues). If you want to avoid building all target, you can use this option on qemu configure : --target-list=sh4-softmmu The command is : qemu-system-sh4 -M r2d -kernel output/images/zImage -drive file=output/images/rootfs.ext2,if=ide,format=raw -append root=/dev/sda console=ttySC1,115200 noiotrap