diskless ubuntu serial console

I'm using Ubuntu servers with qemu-kvm as a virtualization solution. The software included in 10.04LTS includes a variety of annoyances, such as broken PXE, odd bridge behavior, and "general weirdness." Although 10.10 is not supported in the long term, I decided to try it.

The good news is, the 10.10 virtualization stack works much better. The bad news is, 10.10 didn't want to run on my diskless hardware. Boot attempts all died with many lines of:

ipconfig: no devices to configure

and a...