Your objective is to install the current Arch version as a virtual server using QEMU. You should cd into qemu.images directory to do this assignment.

Once you have changed directory to qemu.images, you will need to download Arch; one link to do is to this current Arch image.

Now create a arch.img image file; please make it 15G in size: qemu-img create -f qcow2 arch.img 15G

You can now boot into your ISO image with your new Arch image file as an adjunct:

~/qemu.images $ qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 4096 -boot d -cdrom archlinux-2019.10.01-x86_64.iso -hda arch.img 

Now follow the installation instructions at Arch Installation Guide. (This is the Arch equivalent of a Gentoo stage 3 install.)

One thing to bear in mind is that your arch.img file is visible as /dev/sda; you will need to partition this. I recommend fdisk /dev/sda, but there are lots of partitioning tools, such as cfdisk and parted. I would strongly recommend creating only one partition; I definitely recommend not creating swap or separate partitions for subdirectories like /usr since these do not help you, and make the installation process unnecessarily complex.

You don't need to worry about EFI/BIOS/MBR issues; by default, your QEMU image is using BIOS/MBR. Likewise, the keyboard set-up is fine as-is.

Another thing is that while much of this exercise is deterministic, you will have to make a choice as to a bootloader. I personally prefer syslinux, but grub is far more common (and complex!)

Once you have installed the bootloader, it's time to try out your new image. Exit the chroot environment (with exit) and do a poweroff (to your virtual machine, not your real Debian box!) Then restart with this command:

~/qemu.images $ qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 4096 -boot a -hda arch.img     

Please let me know when you have finished, and I will check your work.