Building modern Blender for Raspberry Pi 5 (I guess probably not)

Building Blender
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My main computer bit the dust yesterday (it was considerate of it to choose Black Friday to do it on though) and as a result I’m using a Raspberry Pi 5 as my desktop system for a few days. It’s actually working surprisingly well, so I wondered if I could build Blender on it, amid all the talk about Wayland compositing in its new Bookworm based Pi OS, Vulkan support in Mesa, etc.

It looks however as though there just isn’t enough hardware oomph there, since they just claim the GPU components of the SoC are able to implement OpenGL ES 3.1 which is a far cry from full OpenGL 4.3+ that we need for modern Blender.

So, while I was able to get it to build successfully, it doesn’t get very far:

$ ./blender
EGL Error (0x3009): EGL_BAD_MATCH: Arguments are inconsistent (for example, a valid context requires buffers not supplied by a valid surface).
EGL Error (0x3009): EGL_BAD_MATCH: Arguments are inconsistent (for example, a valid context requires buffers not supplied by a valid surface).
EGL Error (0x3009): EGL_BAD_MATCH: Arguments are inconsistent (for example, a valid context requires buffers not supplied by a valid surface).
EGL Error (0x3009): EGL_BAD_MATCH: Arguments are inconsistent (for example, a valid context requires buffers not supplied by a valid surface).
Warning: No OpenGL vendor detected.
blender: …/src/dispatch_common.c:872: epoxy_get_proc_address: Assertion `0 && “Couldn’t find current GLX or EGL context.\n”’ failed.
Aborted

Oh well :slight_smile:

It was a fun experiment.

P.S. I assume blender.chat crashed and is down currently?

1 Like
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Have you tried spoofing the GPU with “export MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.3”

I wonder also about adding a (low cost?) external GPU that supports OpenGPL 4.3+,
considering that Rpi5 has PCIe and USB 3.0 I think this could become an option (eventually…)

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I had this same thought, wondered if anyone had tried it, and ran across your posted question (late). I think that Pi 5/bookworm support for Vulkan is actually farther along than that for OpenGL. Raspberry Pi Ltd. worked with a company called Igalia to develop the Vulkan drivers for Pi 5. Is their thinking that OpenGL is perhaps a dead-end?

The Blender devs, moving towards Vulkan, have some things to say about that too. Maybe this is a “convergence moment” for Blender running on Pi 5? Seems to me like a pretty cool combination!