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I needed to add a persistent network configuration (which I didn't really figure out -- I was okay with starting an interface manually. I also had to re-generate the SSH host keys for some reason.
In order to do these, I loaded the image in initramfs (basically started the VM w/o specifying root=/dev/vda as the command line argument). Then I mounted /dev/vda and chroot'd to it. Then I could change the root password to something that I knew, and setup the keys / config.
I also was able to use the Ubuntu kernel/initrd to load a Debian 10 image as well. The default Debian 10 cloud image doesn't include the necessary kernel modules (virtio_console might be the only one necessary to add).
I've spent a few days testing out this and the linked vftool (https://github.com/evansm7/vftool) to try to get a Debian VM. It's not an easy thing, but it did eventually work. I ended up corrupting the disk image though, so that wasn't fun.
In order to do this on my Mac w/o needing a Linux machine, I installed ext4fuse so that I could mount raw disk images and mount partitions. I followed instructions from this GH issue, which was a great help.
https://github.com/evansm7/vftool/issues/2
For those looking for a UI and full desktop environment UTM has full support for the M1 now: https://github.com/utmapp/UTM