This is the mail archive of the
gsl-discuss@sourceware.org
mailing list for the GSL project.
Uninitialised rng state
- From: M Joonas Pihlaja <jpihlaja at cc dot helsinki dot fi>
- To: gsl-discuss at sources dot redhat dot com
- Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 08:30:41 +0200 (EET)
- Subject: Uninitialised rng state
Hi gsl-l,
Valgrind complains about using uninitialised memory when
accessing all gsl_rng_size() bytes of the gsl_rng_state() arrays
returned by some rng types.
One example is mt19937 whose state has lots of unsigned longs
followed by an int. On a 64 bit machine the size of the state is
5000 bytes of which 4 bytes are pad bytes inserted by the
compiler due to the mix of int/ulong. So later when I twiddle
the state valgrind triggers on the uninitialised access. So I was
wondering whether gsl_rng_alloc() really ought to calloc the
state instead of mallocing it. Thoughts?
As a workaround I'm currently clearing the entire state right
after calling gsl_rng_alloc() and then calling gsl_rng_set(rng,
gsl_rng_default_seed) right after. This does quell valgrind, but
is it a sane thing to do?
Cheers,
Joonas