Flow finishing fails without GUI

[UDXS]

Subject

[Flow] for any util, flow Makefile, or flow script issues.

Describe the bug

When OpenROAD is built with GUI, the flow expects GUI backend to be available. This is not always the case on a lot of university/lab-type shared UNIX instances that rely on optional X forwarding.

Expected Behavior

Either OR or ORFS should fail out gracefully if GUI is unavailable and skip the generation of images.

Environment

N/A (OpenROAD distributed binary)

To Reproduce

save_images_gcd_ihp-sg13g2_base_2025-04-02_15-52.tar.gz

Relevant log output

==========================================================================
finish report_design_area
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Design area 23796 u^2 98% utilization.
[WARNING GUI-0076] could not connect to display docker.for.mac.host.internal:0
[INFO GUI-0075] Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.
[ERROR GUI-0077] This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, xcb.

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::runtime_error'
  what():  GUI-0077
Signal 6 received
Stack trace:
 0# 0x000055555635FF0D in /usr/bin/openroad
 1# 0x00007FFFFB0F7520 in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
 2# pthread_kill in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
 3# raise in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
 4# abort in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
 5# 0x00007FFFFB489B9E in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
 6# 0x00007FFFFB49520C in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
 7# 0x00007FFFFB4941E9 in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
 8# __gxx_personality_v0 in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
 9# 0x00007FFFFB2F4884 in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1
10# _Unwind_Resume in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1
11# 0x00007FFFFBC7A2F9 in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Core.so.5
12# QMessageLogger::fatal(char const*, ...) const in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Core.so.5
13# QGuiApplicationPrivate::createPlatformIntegration() in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Gui.so.5
14# QGuiApplicationPrivate::createEventDispatcher() in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Gui.so.5
15# QCoreApplicationPrivate::init() in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Core.so.5
16# QGuiApplicationPrivate::init() in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Gui.so.5
17# QApplicationPrivate::init() in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Widgets.so.5
18# gui::startGui(int&, char**, Tcl_Interp*, std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&, bool, bool, bool) in /usr/bin/openroad
19# gui::Gui::showGui(std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&, bool, bool) in /usr/bin/openroad
20# show(char const*, bool, bool) in /usr/bin/openroad
21# 0x0000555556A7367B in /usr/bin/openroad
22# TclNRRunCallbacks in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtcl8.6.so
23# 0x00007FFFFF649028 in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtcl8.6.so
24# Tcl_EvalEx in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtcl8.6.so
25# Tcl_Eval in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtcl8.6.so
26# sta::sourceTclFile(char const*, bool, bool, Tcl_Interp*) in /usr/bin/openroad
27# 0x0000555556360AD4 in /usr/bin/openroad
28# Tcl_MainEx in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtcl8.6.so
29# main in /usr/bin/openroad
30# 0x00007FFFFB0DED90 in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
31# __libc_start_main in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
32# _start in /usr/bin/openroad
Command terminated by signal 6
Elapsed time: 0:02.13[h:]min:sec. CPU time: user 1.98 sys 0.12 (98%). Peak memory: 182696KB.
make[1]: *** [Makefile:800: do-6_report] Error 134
make: *** [Makefile:798: logs/ihp-sg13g2/gcd/base/6_report.log] Error 2

Screenshots

No response

Additional Context

No response

[vvbandeira]

@UDXS, when running OR without a proper X setup, you can export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen, this allows some GUI functionality to work without X