Exploring AArch64 assembler

For those who are interested in running your software on AArch64 hardware directly, without any additional firmware or operating system in between, I&#x27;ve developed a boot loader and tool chain to test and execute unikernels on a Pine64:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Lichtso&#x2F;UnikernelExperiments" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Lichtso&#x2F;UnikernelExperiments</a>

This article is very short and shallow. I mean... you can apply it to any architecture that Qemu supports (and there are many). Altogether there are 2 assembler instructions in the whole article. Not much of an exploration...<p>Qemu usermode emulation is nice, but the full-hardware emulation is way more interesting. Eg. in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dpc&#x2F;titanos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dpc&#x2F;titanos</a> - toy kernel for Aarch64 written in our lord-and-saviour programming language: Rust, I use Qemu to run kernel and unittests for that kernel. With Qemu gdb stubs it&#x27;s like having a software-defined hardware platform with a JTAG debugger attached. `make run` and it runs - no need to plug cables and press reset buttons.

I recommend the Pine 64 board. I bought one (2GB RAM, gigabit ethernet model, for 29$ [1]), and despite running its 4 cores at just 1.2GHz, it is quite speedy, and rock solid running Debian 24&#x2F;7 as ARM64 build server.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pine64.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pine64.org&#x2F;</a> (I&#x27;m not related to Pine, just a satisfied user)

Another cool thing you can do is setup the kernel&#x27;s binfmt handler to run the user-mode qemu emulation automatically.

&gt; single-board computers that support the 64-bit mode of ARMv8 are less common<p>hey, you can use Nexus 5x, 6p or Pixel phones! I&#x27;ve been meaning to write a blog post about this.