Last time I looked, the canonical manuals for the ARM architecture were quite expensive. If anyone has advice on piecing the basics together please let me know. I don't know much assembly, am currently playing with 6502 assembly, and have been writing a 32-bit VM just by working it out as I go.
I do have a set of reference manuals, opportunity purchase, for acorn-era ARM systems. What sort of consistency would I find between historic ARM instruction set and the latest 32 and 64 bit versions?
"ARM Architecture Reference Manual" yields quite a few hits for various ARM systems, including ARMv8; the Raspberry Pi's ARMv6 instruction set is also available.
One big change is that modern ARM processors tend to run mostly in Thumb (16-bit instruction) mode. It's faster, but you lose all the fun condition codes. High-performance code should take advantage of NEON.
If the above does not answer your question, please ask a more specific one. ;-)
I do have a set of reference manuals, opportunity purchase, for acorn-era ARM systems. What sort of consistency would I find between historic ARM instruction set and the latest 32 and 64 bit versions?