Stack Exchange network consists of 176 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. Visit Stack Exchange A PAC is derived from >> +a pointer, another value (such as the stack pointer), and a secret key >> +held in system registers. >> + >> +The extension adds instructions to insert a valid PAC into a pointer, >> +and to verify/remove the PAC from a pointer. This is the first thing an ARM cortex M3/M4 will execute straight out of reset.Well, actually the first thing that the processor would do is the stack-pointer loading form the address 0000_0000, but technically loading the stack-pointer register isn't 'executing' so its correct to say that the first thing that the ARM processor executes out of ...