libelektra | Elektra serves as a universal and secure framework | Configuration Management library

As far as I can see, there's nothing wrong with your code, or the Valgrind report by itself, as as you've pointed out:

"still reachable" means your program is probably ok -- it didn't free some memory it could have. This is quite common and often reasonable. Don't use --show-reachable=yes if you don't want to see these reports.

Hence, it's likely the 192 bytes aren't really leaked, you've just managed to exit the program before the OS decided to grab back that block of memory — ie. it kept that block under the process's purview, as a optimisation for the next allocation to be made. In this case, the process just exited, so that memory will have to be reclaimed at process termination, and I think that's what "still reachable" means — memory that is fine, and will be reclaimed normally. Hopefully .

The Valgrind errors on FreeBSD aren't allocation problems, but use of an uninitialized zone of memory. They don't look to be inside libgit2 but OpenSSL itself, while parsing certificates (?). You can find the underlying OpenSSL initialization starting from here.

Is it worth giving this a closer look or is such a difference in behavior normal when ignoring the that LibGit must be initialized?

I'm tempted to say no, and yes. The code is now prodding a memory location that contains random garbage instead of an stack-allocated pthread_something. Segfaults are bound to happen randomly.

HTH !