[Paraview] pvserver not rendering when built with osmesa (MPI disabled)

[Jeff Mauldin]

I am trying to run a paraview server (pvserver) on a multinode machine 
using osmesa to do offscreen rendering (and then viewed from a client on 
another machine).

I have been successful in compiling pvserver with osmesa.  However, when 
I try to use pvserver, it hangs.  Specifically, I start a paraview 
client on machine A (bentley) and ask for a reverse-connection 
connection to a pvserver which I will start manually on machine B.  I go 
to machine B and start pvserver (in reverse connect, with machine A 
specified as the client host).

The connection is successful insofar as the output on the terminal I 
started pvserver on on machine B says

Connected to client.

However, no rendering occurs on the paraview client on Machine A.

quite a bit of digging later (including putting some printf calls into 
pvserver on machine B), I've figured out where the hang is:

In

vtkPVSynchronizedRenderWindows::SynchronizeBounds
we are in case RENDER_SERVER and we freeze during either the
c_rs_controller->Send
or
c_rs_controller->Receive
call.

A bit of the call stack is:

vtkPVSynchronizedRenderWindows::SynchronizeBounds
vtkPVRenderView::GatherBoundsInformation
vtkPVRenderView::Render

I belive this is the first render attempt made by pvserver.

I had compiled pvserver without MPI and am currently trying to recompile 
it with MPI.