- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(programming)#Magic_debug_values
But, if you want to know the big picture, read on ;-)
Chances are, you stumbled here after doing some hardcore debugging and found yourself baffled at the values that showed-up in the CPU registers or in the heap/stack memory. I found the first two values in the title (0xDEADBEEF and a variant of the second, i.e. 0xFEEEFEEEFEEEFEEE) while doing debugging in two different systems. The 0xDEADBEEF was on a System i (Power 5) system and the second one was on a Windows 64-bit machine.
All of these values are debugging-aid value, so to speak. It makes them very visible in the debugger (for those who already know). The purpose is to signal that something went wrong and to give an idea what possibly wrong, i.e. where the error possibly comes from, just with a glance on the debugger. For example, 0xDEADBEEF could mean either the program accessed unitialized (heap?) memory or a NULL pointer is encountered (pointing to uninitialized memory). Anyhow, it means something is wrong with one of your pointer. Similar case is indicated by 0xFEEEFEEE or its 64-bit variant.
These "readable" hexadecimal values are categorized as hexspeak because it looks like a "language" despite being hexadecimal value, i.e. you can read them aloud in English or other intended human language. The most hilarious of them all is 0xB16B00B5 ("Big Boobs"). I wonder who was the Hyper-V project manager at the time this Linux guest signature was determined at Microsoft LoL.
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