What does 8badf00d mean?

Question

Sometimes my iPhone application crashes with a weird crashlog, that reads exception code is 0x8badf00d. The stacktraces show random snapshots of app execution, but nothing suspicious. This happens very rarely and I'm not able to find out how to reproduce it. Does anybody know more about this kind of exception and exception code?

Here is an excerpt from my crashlogs:

Exception Type: 00000020
Exception Codes: 0x8badf00d
Highlighted Thread: 0

Application Specific Information:
Failed to deactivate

Thread 0:
...
< nothing suspicious here >
...

Unknown thread crashed with unknown flavor: 5, state_count: 1

Answer 1

0x8badf00d is the error code that the watchdog raises when an application takes too long to launch or terminate. See Apple's Crash Reporting for iPhone OS Applications document