This repo should get you up and running writing ARM assembly without hardware.

The first step is to install the necessary packages. These are the arm-none-eabi tool chain and qemu with arm support.

sudo pacman -S arm-none-eabi-gcc arm-none-eabi-binutils arm-none-eabi-gdb \
  arm-none-eabi-newlib qemu qemu-arch-extra

sudo apt -y install \
    make \
    gcc-arm-none-eabi \
    binutils-arm-none-eabi \
    gdb-arm-none-eabi \
    libstdc++-arm-none-eabi-newlib \
    libnewlib-arm-none-eabi \
    qemu-system-arm

In .gdbinit we have placed commands which gdb will run on startup. But to make this work the .gdbinit file in our home directory needs to say its ok for gdb to load this .gdbinit file. To do that we just add the directory to the auto-load safe-path.

echo "set auto-load safe-path $PWD" >> ~/.gdbinit

The Makefile should have plenty of comments to help you understand what is being done in it. It takes all the .s assembly files in the current directory and compiles them into object files. Then it runs the linker to create the ELF binary. All of this is done with arm-none-eabi-gcc rather than your regular gcc for host programs.

make

Will rebuild all the modified .s files into their object file forms and relink to the binary. Run make clean all if you are having really weird errors. That usually fixes things.

To run you can do qemu-arm ./main. But hey why not put it in the Makefile right.

make all qemu

Will rebuild any changed files and run the created binary in qemu.

Oh you ran the program and everything exploded? Time to debug.

make all gdb

Will rebuild all your source files and start the program in qemu with it as a gdb target on port 1234, so make sure nothing else is using that port or change it in the .gdbinit file and Makefile.

Comment with the problem so we can figure it out on here and everyone else can see the solution.