The current app-emulation/qemu ebuild does not contain the pp64el in the list of possible QEMU_SOFTMMU_TARGETS. The PowerPC 64bit little endian architecture is supported by qemu and there is such a target for the user space emulation (there it is called ppc64le, either name is fine). Please add the above target to the list of full system emulations (aka virtual machine targets).
it's "ppc64le" not "ppc64el". this is the name upstream uses.
also, upstream doesn't have a softmmu target yet afaict. look in default-configs/. the qemu ebuild already does a check at prepare time to make sure the ebuild is in sync with the source.
Ubuntu provides a ppc64le system emulation target for example: http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/amd64/qemu-system-ppc/filelist So I think it should already be available from the sources, it just needs support in the ebuild.
(In reply to Jan Henke from comment #3) that's just a symlink. pretty sure the tool itself doesn't change behavior. i see no point in creating that symlink in Gentoo, and i think it might be kind of harmful: relying on non-standard names that few distros provides is bad. $ tar xf qemu_2.5+dfsg-5ubuntu10.1.debian.tar.xz $ grep -h ppc64 debian/*.links usr/bin/qemu-system-ppc64 usr/bin/qemu-system-ppc64le $ ar x qemu-system-ppc_2.5+dfsg-5ubuntu10.1_amd64.deb $ tar tvf data.tar.xz | grep ppc64le lrwxrwxrwx root/root 0 2016-05-11 07:46 ./usr/bin/qemu-system-ppc64le -> qemu-system-ppc64
I am sorry. I never realized it is just a symlink. I share your opinion that a pure symlink does not make sense. So this issue is closed by that then.