on entry to DLASD4 parameter number -1 had an illegal value

[lo]

hello,

on a Linux suse, with Octave 3.8.0 built against the Intel MKL library,
I get the error message:

"
on entry to DLASD4 parameter number -1 had an illegal value
exception encountered in Fortran subroutine dgelsd_
"

it happens with the following piece of code for least-square regression:

function coefs = lreg(x, y)

    coefs = (x' * x) \ (x' * y);

return

I guess it would be better if I had instead
    coefs = pinv(x' * x)* (x' * y);
but I haven't tried this yet,
the drawback of this alternative is that it is fairly slow;

the routine lreg is part of a much bigger program that calls lreg many 
times,
and it takes more than a day before it blows up and issues the 
aforementioned error message;

With octave 3.8.2 built wo/ the MKL library, on another laptop,
everything works fine;
however, I would prefer to stick to the version with the MKL lib
since it is much faster as it runs on multiple cores;
could someone help on this ?
at least I would like to understand the arcane error message (what is 
parameter number -1?)
and what could trigger it;

thanks,

regards,
Laurent