Ronald G. Minnich ([email protected]) just uploaded a new patch set to gerrit, 
which you can find at http://review.coreboot.org/1221

-gerrit

commit 4715d6b4706fb78e9073295b878b69a6cf37ab6f
Author: Ronald G. Minnich <[email protected]>
Date:   Thu Jul 12 11:21:51 2012 -0700

    Poison the stack to uncover programming errors
    
    Code can easily make the mistake of using uninitialized
    values or, in assembly, mistakenly dereferencing stack pointers
    when an address is desired.
    
    Set the stack to a non-zero value which is also (by testing)
    a pointer which will crash coreboot if used. This poisoning
    has uncovered at least one bug.
    
    Change-Id: I4affb9a14b96611e8bf83cb82636e47913025a5d
    Signed-off-by: Ronald G. Minnich <[email protected]>
---
 src/arch/x86/lib/c_start.S |   10 +++++++---
 1 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/src/arch/x86/lib/c_start.S b/src/arch/x86/lib/c_start.S
index fd9dce7..9c1fdb1 100644
--- a/src/arch/x86/lib/c_start.S
+++ b/src/arch/x86/lib/c_start.S
@@ -16,17 +16,21 @@ _start:
 
        post_code(POST_ENTRY_C_START)           /* post 13 */
 
-       /** clear stack */
+       /** poison the stack. Code should not count on the
+        * stack being full of zeros. This stack poisoning
+        * recently uncovered a bug in the broadcast SIPI
+        * code.
+        */
        cld
        leal    _stack, %edi
        movl    $_estack, %ecx
        subl    %edi, %ecx
        shrl    $2, %ecx   /* it is 32 bit aligned, right? */
-       xorl    %eax, %eax
+       movl    $0xDEADBEEF, %eax
        rep
        stosl
 
-       /** clear bss */
+       /** clear bss, which unlike the stack is zero by definition */
        leal    _bss, %edi
        movl    $_ebss, %ecx
        subl    %edi, %ecx

-- 
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