This article takes a slightly different approach and is fairly recent (2010):
http://balau82.wordpress.com/2010/04...t-on-qemu-arm/
It might be worth checking if the mentioned patches are already in our qemu sources before starting to follow that article. Mainstream may have picked them up but implemented the features a bit differently.
Edit:
One point you will not find in the general articles . . .
The i.MX Freescale SoC has a hardware watchdog which can not be disabled and if not serviced, will reset the core.
So any program running in control of the processor (iBootloader, U-boot, kernel in that order) has to provide code to service the watchdog often enough to keep it from tripping.
Things may not be the same under emulation - I don't know if qemu emulates the non-maskable hardware watchdog.