Valgrind legitimate “possibly lost” bytes example

Question

I saw that valgrind classifies memory leaks into:

• definitely lost
• indirectly lost
• possibly lost
• still reachable

Answer 1

char *p = malloc(100);
if (p != 0)
{
    p += 50;
    /* at this point, no pointer points to the start of the allocated memory */
    /* however, it is still accessible */
    for (int i = -50; i != 50; i++)
        p[i] = 1;
    free (p - 50);
}

Since it looks very interesting, I did run the code and valgrind it. The result is the following.

yjaeyong@carbon:~$ valgrind test
==14735== Memcheck, a memory error detector
==14735== Copyright (C) 2002-2010, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==14735== Using Valgrind-3.6.1-Debian and LibVEX; rerun with -h for copyright info
==14735== Command: test
==14735== 
==14735== 
==14735== HEAP SUMMARY:
==14735==     in use at exit: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==14735==   total heap usage: 32 allocs, 32 frees, 2,017 bytes allocated
==14735== 
==14735== All heap blocks were freed -- no leaks are possible
==14735== 
==14735== For counts of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -v
==14735== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 11 from 6)

It says no leaks are possible. Am I missing anything?

Answer 2

Some examples of what the documentation are different libraries that have their own allocators and for which the memory returned is not directly the pointer returned by the underlying OS allocator (malloc/sbrk), but a pointer after an offset. Consider for example, an allocator that obtained some extra memory and stored meta information (maybe type information for a garbage collector...). The process of allocation and deallocation would be similar to:

void* allocate( size_t size ) {
   metainfo_t *m = (metainfo_t*) malloc( size + sizeof(metainfo) );
   m->data = some_value;
   return (void*)(m+1);          // [1]
}
void deallocate( void* p ) {
   metainfo_t *m = ((metainfo_t*)p) - 1;
   // use data
}
void * memory = allocate(10);

When valgrind is tracking the memory, it remembers the original pointer that was returned by malloc, and that pointer is not stored anywhere in the program. But that does not mean that the memory has been leaked, it only means that the pointer is not directly available in the program. In particular memory still holds the returned pointer, and deallocate can be called to release it, but valgrind does not see the original returned pointer at location (char*)memory - sizeof(metadata_t) anywhere in the program and warns.

Answer 3

char *p = malloc(100);
if (p != 0)
{
    p += 50;
    /* at this point, no pointer points to the start of the allocated memory */
    /* however, it is still accessible */
    for (int i = -50; i != 50; i++)
        p[i] = 1;
    free (p - 50);
}