ppc64el

ppc64el is the designation used for the 64-bit PowerPC little-endian architecture as used by Linux on PowerPC hardware. The “el” suffix stands for little-endian, distinguishing it from the big-endian ppc64 variants. It represents the PowerPC 64-bit architecture operating in little-endian mode on supported IBM POWER processors, such as POWER8 and newer.

In ppc64el, the processor runs in 64-bit mode under the Power ISA with the LP64 data model and the System V ABI for PPC64 little-endian. The architecture uses 64-bit pointers and is supported by the standard Linux user-space toolchain, including GCC, binutils, and glibc configured for PPC64EL. Linux kernels built for this architecture provide features such as power management, SMP, and virtualization support on modern POWER hardware.

Software support and ecosystem are provided by multiple Linux distributions, with Debian and Ubuntu maintaining official ppc64el ports. These builds target IBM POWER8 and newer CPUs and are used on servers and high-end workstations that benefit from the POWER architecture’s performance and scalability. While the ecosystem is smaller than that of x86_64, a broad range of packages is available, and many applications can be built from source when prebuilt binaries are not available.

Overall, ppc64el enables Linux to run on PowerPC hardware in little-endian mode, aligning with modern POWER processors while maintaining compatibility with the broader PPC64 family and its ABI expectations.