Calling ARM assembly from C, GCC (bare metal)

Question

I am trying to do some bare-metal programming in ARM with GCC and testing on QEMU. Whenever I call into an ARM label from C, my program hangs. I have a simple example of code that shows the problem at https://gist.github.com/1654392 -- when I call activate() in that code, it hangs.

I have observed with objdump that when I do a bl from assembly to C code (as from _start) it is generating a small wrapper that switches to thumb instructions. It seems that the C code is all being generated in thumb instructions, but all my assembly is being generated in ARM (32-bit) instructions. I cannot figure out why this is or how to fix it.