The on-chip firmware for the Marin SoC has been updated with the gdb stub, so now when you program the FPGA, you'll see the following on the serial console:
MOXIE On-Chip Bootloader v2.0
Copyright (c) 2013 Anthony Green
Waiting for an S-Record Download or Remote GDB Connection...
...and the Nexys3 7 segment display reads "FEEd". At this point you can send down an srecord encoded binary that will then start running at 0x30000000 (7 segment display reads "3000"), or connect with moxie-elf-gdb (7 segment display reads "dEb2"). A typical gdb session looks like this:
The final bit of the puzzle was a missing feature in the on-chip RAM controller -- not external RAM, but RAM cobbled together from FPGA logic which is used by the on-chip firmware for stack & heap. I had left out byte-level access in my initial design, so every read/write was 16-bits - potentially wiping out memory unintentionally. Once I figure this out, everything started to work.
I'm done with the on-chip bootloading firmware for now!