You mean can I run it without having X11 running? Yes, of course, with -nographic. How do you think most major VPS providers run qemu? They certainly don't run their hosts with X11 going.
And yes, it runs on not-Linux, but obviously the main selling point of qemu is the access it provides to KVM, which is an interface provided by the Linux kernel. You can do software emulation of a number of architectures on a number of operating systems with qemu.
Are you saying you yourself do this? You're using BSD, running in VGA textmode, from which you run qemu with -nographic to load an image of another OS? You yourself are doing this?
Most of "major VPS providers" I know use Linux, not BSD. (Yes, there are some exceptions but the reliance on Linux is almost universal.)
I would love it if you were right and I am wrong, but I seriously doubt you have tested this recently. I will happily give Qemu another go if you have tested this recently and it worked.
So you are admitting you have not tested this and you are just going by what you read.
When was the last time you used any "smaller Unices"?
Anyway, even if the problems with -nographic on x86 have been fixed on other non-FreeBSD BSD's (and I have my doubts), my comment that compiling qemu has become a substantial undertaking still stands. I suspect you've probably never even tried compiling it yourself but that will not stop you from commenting.
I compile Bochs statically on low powered computers with no problems. Cannot say the same for Qemu. Even you're not using x11 they expect you to have x11 libraries at compile time. As with most programs that grow so large, there are more than a few dependencies one can do without.
Is it working for you in VGA text mode (no x11)?
Is this now working on other UNIX-like OS besides Linux?
I have had problems with -nographic in the past and I know others who have as well, but maybe it works reliably now?