GSoC 2017 student report: core lockstep for minion cores

This year, as part of Google Summer of Code we had the pleasure of working with Nikitas Chronas. Alongside his degree studies, Nikitas had become involved with the Libre Space Foundation and developed a strong interest in the possibility of open source hardware in CubeSats. Fault tolerance of some sort is important for harsh environments, and Nikitas worked to add fault tolerance through the implementation of core lockstep for the PULPino-based minion core subsystem. This was a really successful project which ended up making contributions in areas beyond the core lockstep focus: documentation, code quality, support for the Arty FPGA development board, and even prototyping a code generation mechanism. See the detailed write-up for all the details, and below for the all-important blinky lights demo.