Really lovely writeup. I liked the discussion of determining how can you tell if a randomly-generated program performed correctly. The obvious approach is to just run it on an "oracle" -- another processor or simulator -- and see if it behaves the same way. But if you're checking for microarchitectural effects with tight timing windows you can also write the same program with various stalls, fences, nops and so on -- things which shouldn't affect the output (for single-threaded code) but which will result in the CPU doing significantly different things microarchitecturally. That way the CPU can be its own oracle.