most parallel tests failing

[ltalirz]

While the serial tests pass, most parallel tests are currently failing

The ones that pass seem to be the "gamma" ones:

tests/testw90_benzene_gamma_val - benzene.win: Passed.

tests/testw90_benzene_gamma_val_hexcell - benzene.win: Passed.

tests/testw90_benzene_gamma_valcond - benzene.win: Passed.

tests/testw90_example07 - silane.win: Passed.

tests/testw90_na_chain_gamma - Na_chain.win: Passed.

All done. ERROR: only 5 out of 54 tests passed.

For some reason, the parallel tests pass on Quantum Mobile (which includes a number of other roles).
This makes me suspect that the difference is at the configure stage.

@giovannipizzi any ideas?

[giovannipizzi]

I tried locally and went into the machine, I think it's because of this error:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
mpirun has detected an attempt to run as root.
Running at root is *strongly* discouraged as any mistake (e.g., in
defining TMPDIR) or bug can result in catastrophic damage to the OS
file system, leaving your system in an unusable state.

You can override this protection by adding the --allow-run-as-root
option to your cmd line. However, we reiterate our strong advice
against doing so - please do so at your own risk.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

[ltalirz]

Thanks for looking into this!
Do you know how to tell the tests to use mpirun --allow-run-as-root?
Otherwise I'll simply disable the parallel tests on docker

[giovannipizzi]

Mmm, the string is hardcoded in testcode:

testcode/lib/testcode2/__init__.py:        self.launch_parallel = 'mpirun -np tc.nprocs'

This is configurable but one would need to change all entries in the file test-suite/tests/userconfig.

I see a few approaches:

• add an alias mpirun -> mpirun --allow-run-as-root in the bashrc, and see if this is enough
• if the alias is not honored (I'm not sure if it's run in a shell or not), add a bash script called mprirun that simply calls /usr/.../mpirun --allow-run-as-root "$@" and put its containing folder in the path, before the actual mpirun
• get the code (or a copy of the code) in a folder writable by a normal user and run the tests as a user (probably better, but more complex - if the user is not going to run except for tests, maybe the approaches above for the user root are enough, with the comment that this is just for testing and shouldn't be used in production)