It seems to me that this ends up raising an AssertionError with MKL or other cases where our Xerbla isn't properly linked in. This may not be desirable.

The purpose of this test is to provide test coverage for our xerbla handler, if it is present. Since the behavior of a default xerbla is undefined (it can abort or just print a message), it doesn't seem possible to me to distinguish this from bugs in our xerbla handler.

So it seems to me this should raise a SkipTest rather than AssertionError. Then, the test never fails, but succeeds on some platforms and is skipped on others.