Guess you were right about that free part...
I happened to go to one of the schools they list as working with, so I decided to apply for a free 1-year academic license. The next day I got a reply with the FlexLM license file and information on how to download it.
I haven't had a chance to try it yet but it sounded interesting. Kinda like a commercial bochs with more architectures supported. Like bochs everything is deterministic, but it's supposed to provide a lot more information, like dumping information about cache misses, etc.
Also, it can simulate clusters and even network computers (apparently for a demo they had it simulate two computers, each with two processors, one running linux, the other windows, talking to each other over the network) they say even the networked computers run deterministically, so it sounds good for debugging hard-to-recreate race conditions, etc.
Anyways, I'm gonna start trying it out now, I'll let you know how it works.
- Brandon