Pre-loading application memory

[Robert Rose <rose@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone could provide some insight as to how I 
could pre-load my entire application's memory heap with predefined 
values, like 0xDEADBEEF for example.  I'm interested in doing this on 
gcc-3.0 x86 and gcc-psion-2.9 (symbian).

I'm trying to track down some elusive "invalid floating point 
operation" exceptions in a large application.  This exception (I 
believe) is caused when a signal-NaN float (SNaN) is an operator to a 
floating point instruction.  I'm assuming the root cause is there are 
some uninitialized floats laying about.  If I can pre-load my 
application's heap with nothing but SNaN then I should be able to 
reliably reproduce the bug and trap it on my development system, and 
find the unitialized floats faster.  It's a very large app, and line 
checking all these floats isn't getting me anywhere...

Any suggestions would be appreciated.  Thanks!

-robert