Clang/amd compiler flags showing up in export_albany.in causing issues building MALI on frontier

[mcarlson801]

I'm trying to add MALI to the nightly builds on Frontier and I'm running into an issue when trying to build. Make is failing to compile a PIO test program due to Clang/AMD compiler flags sneaking into export_albany.in link flags and then not being recognized by the fortran compiler. The offending compiler flags are --hip-link and --offload-arch=gfx90a.

I'm not very familiar with cmake, @bartgol or anyone, do you know why these flags would be getting added to the link line? It looks like maybe I can filter flags starting with -- out here but I'm not sure if that won't break something else.

[bartgol]

Ugh, I wish MALI used CMake rather than rely on the hacky export_albany.in file... We ran into similar issues when running with ninja as well as when trying other funky compilers (which added unrecognized flags).

You need to look at cmake/CreateExportAlbany. In the run function, we grab the content of link.txt for a dummy target that links against albany, and we extract all the flags to be written in export_albany.in. You can add some print statements in there, to see what's happening.

[bartgol]

Ah, wait, this is different. The export_albany.in file is correct, but when PIO uses it to link, it sees flags it doesn't recognize... This is hard. We basically need to change MALI, so that it does NOT use export_albany.in when testing PIO... After all, it should not need albany/trilinos to test pio, no?

[mcarlson801]

Does MALI only use the fortran compiler (with export_albany.in libs) to build the PIO test program? If so, yeah, that's probably the solution to not use the albany/trilinos libs there.

At any rate, I put a step in the frontier MALI build script to filter the flags out so we have a build going at least.