You're incorrect that Foxit reader has not been subject to attacks or flaws. This article from last year, for instance, describes in-the-wild attacks of Foxit. A Google search for "foxit reader buffer overflow" brings up a number of known (though patched by now) exploits.

Foxit reader, like any other piece of software, is bound to have errors. Use it because you like the interface, or use it because it's less likely to be exploited due to its relative unpopularity. Don't delude yourself into thinking it's completely secure. That's the same fallacious argument that some OSX and Linux users make when saying that their operating systems are immune from viruses or worms. They may be more secure when compared to Windows, but there's nothing in their underlying architecture that prevents them from being exploited with enough effort.

Sure, but it's much faster to do it in hardware. This is the whole reason data watchpoints exist (See, for instance, the paper "Some Requirements for Architectural Support of Software Debugging" by Mark Scoctt Johnson from ASPLOS-I), as you could technically have your debugger put address & data checks around every memory access, but that leads to completely unacceptable overheads. It's faster to let the hardware check the addresses in parallel with regular execution and take a fault only if you touch the watchpoint.

Similarly, if the hardware will check the value before taking a debug interrupt to the kernel and subsequently signaling/scheduling of the debugger, it will be much, much faster than performing all that and then have the debugger check the address & throw this particular interrupt away before continuing execution. That constant interrupt cycle can cause 10,000x or more slowdowns if you're constantly accessing a value & taking bad watchpoints on it.

Oh, and the summary's description, "hardware data-aware conditional breakpoints, and direct hardware 'page guard'-style breakpoints", matches up with the line I copied & pasted from the forum post. I previously described the "hardware data-aware conditional breakpoints"where you can make hardware take a fault if an address of a memory operation is matched && the value of the memory operation matches. Looking through my notes, embedded Power ISA (Book III-E) processors also let you set value-dependent watchpoints using the Data Address Compare (DAC) Registers. I'm not sure about other ISAs.

The second party of the summary's statement refers to to 'page guard'-style breakpoints. This is referenced by Czernobyl's "masking of any or all of 12 low address bits". Again, this is a very interesting extension of the x86 debug registesr, which only allow debug watchpoints of size 1, 2, 4, or 8 bytes (and the latter only in certain microarchitectures & modes) However, by masking out the low 1--12 bits of the address into don't-cares, it's possible to set watchpoints anywhere from 1-4096 bytes, limited to powers-of-two and size-alignment. This is cool from an x86 standpoint, but ARM, MIPS, and Itanium (off the top of my head) already do this.

Suffice it to say, the stuff that Czernobyl found is very cool in relation to x86, especially if these facilities were officially released to the public at any point in the future. However, it's very unlikely to cause any kind of AMD-only viruses or other scary security concerns. These features exist on other ISAs without any kind of world-shattering problems. :)

Based solely on the Google cache of the forum post describing this (linked above), there's no need to go into hysterics. For hardware and systems geeks, this is very cool. It's an extension of the existing x86 debug registers (DR0-7) that allows you to set a debug watchpoint that only fires when specific data is loaded in.

There are a lot of researchers and tool builders that would love to have this because it would allow them to take a watchpoint fault whenever they only when they have a specific value from a specific location. For instance, let's say that every so often you get a null pointer exception at a specific address. However, if you current go into gdb and set 'watch 0x{address}', you're going to take a breakpoint every single time that pointer is accessed.. Wouldn't it be great to do something like 'watch 0x{address} NULL' and only stop your debugger whenever 0 gets written into that address?

That's what the forum posts imply, at least. "Guys, I've reversed this in part... breakpoints defined in DR0 can be made to fire only on data match (under optional mask), plus masking of any or all of 12 low address bits ! Works also for I/O break points, provided CR4_DE is set, of course !"

I would wager that this is not a large security concern. Access to DR7 is restricted to ring 0, and therefore enabling debug breakpoints must be done by the operating system. While extremely interesting (I wish I could read more!), Czernobyl appears to be describing a modification to debug breakpoints that are already enabled.

Individuals without a company and contributors with unknown affiliation add more to the Linux kernel than any _individual_ company, but that does not negate the statement that "the majority of contributions to Linux are from profit-making corporations". Red Hat, Novell, and IBM together make more Linux kernel contributions than all of the unaffiliated and unknown-affiliation contributors combined.

The document you appears to have misread even includes this sentence: "It is worth noting that, even if one assumes that all of the 'unknown' contributors were working on their own time, over 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work."