Is there a way to tell valgrind from inside my code when to start and when to stop checking for memory leaks?
I am using a legacy testing framework which must link with my testing program in order to run. The framework has memory leaks in it - valgrind shows about 50KB of memory that has not been released, but is reachable via heuristic. This is annoying, because I must keep this number in mind to see how much memory is leaked from my code. It would be a lot more convenient if I could tell valgrind to start collecting memory stats when my first test begins, and stop collecting when the last test is over. Is there an API for it?
valgrind memcheck allows to do a "differential" leak search. The differential leak search reports the delta between the previous leak search and the current situation.
You can do such a differential leak search using monitor commands with vgdb, either from the shell or from gdb. See https://www.valgrind.org/docs/manual/mc-manual.html#mc-manual.monitor-commands.
You can also use the client request VALGRIND_DO_CHANGED_LEAK_CHECK from your program, see https://www.valgrind.org/docs/manual/mc-manual.html#mc-manual.clientreqs.