it sure is a bodge, but I did it finally
if only the thing ran 100× faster than it currently is
there was a bit of intermezzo where my Fedora session got unstable (me trying to restart dbus isn’t helping, but then again the session has been on since 30 days), so I had to use Jeff as a backup
user-mode emulation could be better (being Arch ARM, the VM runs systemd which extends the boot time a lot), but I have to wait until I’m on Fedora again. this is at least miles ahead from the buildroot image I tried to make (it doesn’t recognize the graphics card at all ='( )
only thing keeping me from ditching virtualbox for qemu is qemu being way too slow
it could be made faster by enabling KVM, but I can’t do that here