It's been a while since my last update.. let me bring you up to speed.

A couple of libffi releases got in the way of moxie hacking (although libffi 3.0.13 now includes full moxie support!), but things are picking up speed again.

On the software side of things …

The hacker behind the Minecraft phenomena, Notch, is working on his next game, most likely another hit. This one is interesting in that it includes an in-game 16-bit processor called the dcpu-16. Details are sparse, but it seems as though gamers will use this processor to control spacecraft and play …

The Moxie ISA still needs quite a bit of tuning. Take branches, for instance. A beq instruction currently encoded like so...

`00001111xxxxxxxx iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii`

...where the "x"s represent "don't care" bits, and "i"s are a 32-bit absolute branch target. That's right -- branch targets are not PC relative! This …

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 …