General Resources for PowerPC™ Developers

These resources have been curated to be useful to many kinds of PowerPC™ developer, including ones targeting classic hardware and those targeting the newest Power9 and Power10 systems.

Freescale/NXP AN2491: Simplified Mnemonics for PowerPC™ Instructions (local mirror)

This Application Note describes the simplified mnemonics that most assemblers accept, and the full instruction to which they resolve. This can be useful in both directions; if you are looking at disassembly of a compiled object and wondering why the assembler transformed one instruction into another, this may hold the answer.

IBM Power Functional Simulator (local mirror - read the license first!)

The PFS has its origins as a research project named Mambo (local mirror). It runs on some major x86_64 systems and allows you to boot a fully functional Linux on Power system in either endianness (big or little). This can be a useful utility for systems programming if you do not want to have to reboot your physical Power system frequently.

The PowerPC Compiler Writer's Guide (no external link)

This guide from IBM is dated 1996, but gives all developers a helping of useful "tricks" in chapter 5 that still apply to this day. Those targeting older 6xx chips will additionally appreciate the documentation on how to make the most of this hardware.

Note well! The ABI described here is not the ABI used by Linux distributions using the musl libc. These distributions use a Secure PLT mode that is not covered by this guide.

PowerPC Version 2.02, Books I-III (no external link)

These books describe the PowerPC architecture. This is useful for writing assembly, systems programmers, tuning, and understanding some of the intracices of the ISA. This version corresponds roughly to the "G4" (74xx) generation of PowerPC chip.

• Book I: User Instruction Set Architecture
• Book II: Virtual Environment Architecture
• Book III: Operating Environment Architecture

Power ISA™ Version 2.03 (no external link)

Once thought lost to the sands of time, this is the first release of IBM's then-nascent Power.org initiative. It is the first combination of the POWER and PowerPC architectures into a single, cohesive unit. This tome describes the architectural features of processors including the Freescale e500 DSP, the IBM 970 with VMX ("AltiVec™"), and POWER5 and POWER6 systems.

Power ISA™ Version 2.07 B (local mirror)

This Power.org release describes the features new to the POWER8 chip. This includes transactional memory, VSX-2, cryptographic acceleration instructions, and hardware CRC support.

Verified for technical accuracy: February 4, 2024
Verified for editorial accuracy: February 4, 2024