On Oct 6, 2005, at 12:20 PM, Zoltan Forray/AC/VCU wrote:

A co-worker says that it was a "recognizable pattern" used to
initialize
storage, rather than just using x'00' or x'FF' !

0xdeadbeef is indeed an historic memory populator, which I've
periodically seen appear over 25 years. My notes:

0xdeadbeef                              Some subsystems pre-populate
allocated
                                        memory with the hexadecimal
string
                                        0xdeadbeef (this 32-bit hex
value is a
                                        data processing affectation)
so as to be
                                        able to detect that an
application has
                                        failed to initialize an
acquired subset
                                        with binary zeroes. Landing
on a
                                        halfword boundary can
obviously lead to
                                        getting variant "0xbeefdead".

  Richard Sims