Re: Oh that's just great
Maybe not to ordinary users. Isolating the source of many bugs requires cycle-accurate simulations. Lots of fun has been had convincing successive design teams of this fact.
Moreover, there are instruction sequences that will put the entire microprocessor and caches into known states. (Up to cycle-accurate predictions.) It's not trivial to develop such a sequence, but I have done this. Again, it's a lot easier to do this if you have the cycle-accurate sim to verify your work, but in the case that I'm talking about, it would be over a year before the sim was finally made cycle accurate.
Vulnerability & bug hunting at the processor level is just flat different than other types of programming. A non-trivial number of programmers fail to grasp this, and end up going elsewhere. Don't assume that what you have been told, or what you have learned, applies directly here.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
