I just read The Race For A New Game Machine today on a cross-country flight, and wow.. fun read!

If you've ever read Tracy Kidder's great book The Soul of a New Machine, you'll know what to expect. But this book chronicles the SONY/Toshiba/IBM Cell partnership, and the …

There's a little more detail on the wiki, but basically...

$ rpm -ivh http://moxielogic.org/download/moxielogic-repo-1-1.noarch.rpm
$ yum groupinstall moxiedev

Your welcome.

Seriously though... release engineering is at times both tedious and fascinating. But mostly tedious. Still, I was interested in tackling a little releng work this week …

A few quick MoxieDev updates...

• The verilog output patch is in binutils
• The moxie ports for binutils, newlib, libgloss and gdb are all upstream. Waiting on sim and gcc reviews.
• The upstream qemu team have switched to git, so I've rebased MoxieDev's qemu against this new repository.

Also, I've been …

The moxie newlib port was just accepted. The GCC port will take a little longer to review, but I hope that it will get accepted early next week. Already there has been some useful feedback resulting in a few improvements. For instance, the moxie libgcc.a now provides the soft-fp …

If there's one thing I've learned about GNU tools development over the years, it's that attempting to maintain a tools port outside of the upstream tree is A Very Bad Idea! It's easy to let your private tree fall out of sync from upstream. And the longer you wait to …

I've written my first bit of verilog tonight. It's not much, really, but it's a start. I'm using Icarus Verilog (iverlog) to compile and simulate the code. I also plan on using GTKWave to examine timing dumps from the iverilog simulator. Both of these tools are part of my development …

My moxie port of U-Boot, the Universal Boot Loader, has started working!

$ qemu-system-moxie -nographic -kernel u-boot
SDRAM :
        U-Boot Start:0x00001000
Using default environment

U-BOOT for "moxiesim"

=> version

U-Boot 2009.03-rc2-00013-gefb4734-dirty (Apr 02 2009 - 20:07:32)
=> printenv
bootargs=root …

My first go at exceptions is working well. The basic idea is that moxie will have a single exception handling routine whose address lives in special register 1. You set the exception handler like so:

void install_handler(void (*handler)(void))
{
  printf ("Installing handler 0x%x\n", (unsigned) handler);
  asm("ssr …

In reading about how other processors handle exceptions, they seem to be of two sorts. Some (most?) processors look into a vector of exception handlers based on the exception type (Divide by Zero, Software Interrupt, IRQ, etc), and the other sort jumps to a single exception address and lets the …

After a UART, one of the most useful and interesting peripherals you can add to a board is a Real Time Clock (RTC). Qemu comes with a simulation of Freescale's MC146818 RTC chip. Adding it to our qemu-defined board was as simple as....

   rtc_mm_init(0x400, 0, 0, 0);

This …