The Portland L4 Kernel, or "pork" for short, is a small, not-quite complete implementation of L4 for the 32 bit x86 architecture. You can download a copy of pork from pork.tar.gz and then unpack it in your ~/Documents/llp/ folder in the usual way.

After studying parts of the design and implementation of the L4 API and the pork microkernel in the lectures, we use the trace of output messages provided in the attached "handout.pdf" to walk through the sequence of steps that the machine goes through in booting and running a simple ping pong demo in pork. All of the messages were captured from output sent to the serial port when the demo was executed. Key questions to be considering as you work through the trace include:

• Which parts of the code were responsible for each of the output messages that you see?

• What can we tell about the state of the machine at the time each of those messages were generated?

• How do the numbers that are included in the output, mostly in hexadecimal notation, relate to concepts that might be more recognizable to L4 developers (e.g., thread numbers, address space details, hardware configuration, etc.)?

For best results, this demonstration should be given by someone who can walk through the output log line by line and provide some explanations about what each message means, and how all of the indvidual steps contribute to getting a working system up and running.