How do I set a software breakpoint on an ARM processor?

Question

How do I do the equivalent of an x86 software interrupt:

asm( \"int $3\" )

on an ARM processor (specifically a Cortex A8) to generate an event

Answer 1

I have a simple library (scottt/debugbreak) just for this:

#include <debugbreak.h>
...
debug_break();

Just copy the single debugbreak.h header into your code and it'll correctly handle ARM, AArch64, i386, x86-64 and even MSVC.

Answer 2

Using arm-none-eabi-gdb.exe cross compiler, this works great for me (thanks to Igor's answer):

__asm__("BKPT");