[Rd] R valgrind question

[Daniel Oberski]

Dear R developers


I am running an instrumented build of R 2.6.1 on ubuntu, compiled with
option configure --with-valgrind-instrumentation=3.

If run valgrind R then I get all sorts of warnings. I was wondering
whether I should worry about them or not.

First, when I open R as follows:

  $R -d "valgrind --tool=memcheck --leak-check=full
--show-reachable=yes" --vanilla

 I get a whole bunch of


==888== Invalid read of size 4
==888==    at 0x4014787: (within /lib/ld-2.5.so)
...
==888==  Address 0x50794A4 is 44 bytes inside a block of size 47 alloc'd
==888==    at 0x4021620: malloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:149)
==888==    by 0x4006EB4: (within /lib/ld-2.5.so)
...

Second, when I exit R I get memory leak reports:

==888== LEAK SUMMARY:
==888==    definitely lost: 132 bytes in 17 blocks.
==888==    indirectly lost: 240 bytes in 20 blocks.
==888==      possibly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
==888==    still reachable: 13,110,032 bytes in 6,340 blocks.
==888==         suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.


I am sorry if this is a stupid question, please be gentle. What should
I make of this?

I was trying to check my own C program (as a standalone program it
does not produce any valgrind warnings), but now I am not sure what is
going on when using valgrind on R..


Best regards,
  daniel