Toying around with LE PowerPC64 via the Power8 simulator

ppc64le_hello is simple example of what it takes to write stand-alone (that is, system or OS) code that runs in Little-Endian and Hypervisor modes on the latest OpenPOWER/Power8 chips. Of course, I don't have a spare $3k to get one of these nice Tyan reference systems, but IBM does have a free, albeit glacially slow and non-OSS, POWER8 Functional Simulator.

What you get is a simple payload you can boot via skiboot, or another OPAL-compatible firmware. Features, in no particular order:

• 64-bit real-mode HV LE operation.
• logging via sim inteface (mambo_write).
• logging via OPAL firmware (opal_write).
• calling C code, stack/BSS/linkage setup/TOC.
• calling BE code from LE.
• FDT parsing, dumping FDT.
• Taking and returning from exceptions, handling unrecoverable/nested exceptions.
• Timebase (i.e. the "timestamp counter"), decrementer and hypervisor decrementer manipulation with some basic timer support (done for periodic callbacks into OPAL).
• Running at HV alias addresses (loaded at 0x00000000200XXXXX, linked at 0x80000000200XXXXX). The idea being that the code will access physical RAM and its own data structures solely using the HV addresses.
• SLB setup: demonstrates 1T segments with 4K base page and 16M base page size. One segment (slot = 0) is used  to back the HV alias addresses with 16M pages. Another  segment maps EA to VA 1:1 using 4K pages.
• Very basic HTAB setup. Mapping and unmapping for pages in the 4K and 16M segments, supporting MPSS (16M pages in the 4K segment). No secondary PTEG. No eviction support. Not SMP safe. Any access within the HV alias addresses get mapped in. Any faults to other  unmapped locations are crashes, as addresses below 0x8000000000000000 should only be explicit maps.
• Taking exception vectors with MMU on at the alternate vector location (AIL) 0xc000000000004000.
• Running unpriviledged code.

See README for more information, including how to build and run. At some point it ran on a real Power8 machine - and may run still ;-).