Hi,
now this is one of those cases where one tries to shoot a small fly with a
nuclear missile. The first assumption that something was wrong with the kernel
setup code was wrong and here's how i know:
The problem with my version of grub not hitting the breakpoint 0x90200 made me
think that something might be messed up in the grub part of the boot sequence.
Thus, i did the qemu simulation again and noticed on the initial boot screen of
grub it saying "Grub version 0.91." However, you remember from a different post
that the version of grub i have is the latest to be found in debian unstable,
0.97-29, so i thought that something has to be wrong with it and especially with all
those grub stages binaries, in my case in /boot/grub, which grub-install setups.
Checking their timestamps revealed that the files are from 2004 so i thought,
well, these are OLD! :) After refreshing the grub installation and replacing
the stages-binaries with the fresh ones, the kernel booted just fine :), here:
[boris@gollum:07:02:07:~:9994)-> uname -a
Linux gollum 2.6.22-4fd06960f120e02e9abc802a09f9511c400042a5-12 #12 PREEMPT Thu Jul 26 18:08:34 CEST 2007 i686 GNU/Linux
so i guess the problem was with the ancient parts of a grub installation i had
lying around which weren't replaced by the apt-get update process and somehow
messed up newer grub versions. Anyway, in the end one still learns a lot while at it.
Thanks for your help.