is there an easy way to turn off PDN generation now?

You can set custom PDN script with PDN_CFG variable. Is you set it to empty file, the PDN generation will be completely skipped (including rails on Met1). You'll also have to disable PDN checks. For example this works for me in config.json: ... "PDN_CFG" : "/dev/null", "FP_PDN_CHECK_NODES" : 0, ... If you need to have rails, but no stripes, or some other PDN config, you'll have to write a custom PDN script (it's quite easy, for example check original one here https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenLane/blob/master/scripts/openroad/common/pdn_cfg.tcl).

got it, thanks. yeah i have an old pdn script from 2020 somewhere