Is that normal ?

No it's not. However, my suspicion is that you're using a newer version of openroad with an older version of openlane. Can you confirm that this line has the flag in your version of openlane? https://github.com/efabless/openlane/blob/22caadd90fe0bd95fad17266cbc767c5657cb4bc/scripts/openroad/or_write_verilog.tcl#L24

@Amr Gouhar As noted in another reply I found the issue. I have my own

interactive.tcl

script (which was derived from

flow.tcl

) and some recent change to openlane moved the writing of the

.powered

netlist from an internal function to the

flow.tcl

top level and I hadn't adapted my script accordingly, yielding LVS to run on the wrong netlist.