The IBM POWER8 Functional Simulator is a simulation environment developed by IBM. It is designed to provide enough POWER8 processor complex functionality to allow the entire software stack to execute, including loading, booting and running a Fedora 20 BE (Big Endian) kernel image or a Debian LE (Little Endian) kernel image. The intent for this tool is to educate, enable new application development, and to facilitate porting of existing Linux applications to the POWER8 architecture. While the IBM POWER8 Functional Simulator serves as a full instruction set simulator for the POWER8 processor, it may not model all aspects of the IBM Power Systems POWER8 hardware and thus may not exactly reflect the behavior of the POWER8 hardware.