I just added a ppc64 target to https://github.com/landley/mkroot which means I built 4.14 with the attached miniconfig and ran it with the attached qemu command line, and it works fine as is but if you remove the transactional mem line from the config the kernel panics instead of launching a shell prompt:
init[1]: unhandled signal 4 at 0000000010001a04 nip 0000000010001a04 lr 000000001002ebe8 code 1 Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exitcode=0x00000004 CPU: 0 PID: 1 Comm: init Not tainted 4.14.0 #1 Call Trace: [c00000000e02fa40] [c0000000004ba730] dump_stack+0xb0/0xf0 (unreliable) [c00000000e02fa80] [c0000000000602a0] panic+0x138/0x2f8 [c00000000e02fb20] [c00000000006541c] do_exit+0xa9c/0xaa0 [c00000000e02fbe0] [c0000000000654d8] do_group_exit+0x58/0xf0 [c00000000e02fc20] [c000000000073274] get_signal+0x1c4/0x6b0 [c00000000e02fd10] [c0000000000142a0] do_signal+0x60/0x290 [c00000000e02fe00] [c00000000001461c] do_notify_resume+0x8c/0xd0 [c00000000e02fe30] [c00000000000b630] ret_from_except_lite+0x5c/0x60 Rebooting in 1 seconds.. Rob
powerpc64le.miniconf
Description: Binary data
qemu-powerpc64le.sh
Description: Bourne shell script