I feel I already know the answer to that one, but I guess it doesn’t hurt to ask: is there an ARM Blender package of any kind - deb, appimage, flatpak… that will run accelerated on the RK3588?
I think the last version of Blender that could use mobile OpenGL 3.1 was 2.7-something, and last I checked, that’s ancient and need to be compiled for ARM, and I’m not doing that.
Just wondering if anybody knows if a kind soul might have done it since.
I have a need to use Blender this weekend and I’d rather not fire my old HP laptop back up.
The problem with compiling blender 2.79.b (the last working version) is not that it’s ARM. The problem is that unless you use a system from back then, you will not be able to compile ancient blender with modern libraries and blender depends on a huge amount of stuff. In Debian that’s 345 packages requiring 1128 MB of disk space. Among that is everything and the kitchen sink.
From January 2022 until October 2023 I was porting blender 2.79.b to more recent versions of python, freetype, glew, libjpeg, libpng, libxi, OpenImageIO, OpenMP, C++14 and the rest of it. The patch became 2k lines long and can be found in the history of reform-debian-packages in commit 3a8ae00644e4aa2cd1c31f4d73809dae8d62dc38 which removed it when I gave up as this ate too much of my time. So no, ARM is not the problem, the huge number of dependencies is.
Yes, there is a patch attempting to make mondern blender work on platforms with non-desktop opengl:
But minute has already spent a lot of time on it and recommends against using it:
There is a way to have blender work on the Reform and that is the upcoming qualcomm quasar board:
This got me curious so I’m trying to build an old copy of blender through guix via guix time-machine, since that’ll make use of all the old libraries from that point in time. But indeed there are no longer binaries available anymore, so that ends up building everything and the kitchen sink
I’ll let you know if it manages to build, if it does I should be able to pack it up into a tarball. But it hasn’t gotten further than building older gcc and guile yet so I don’t expect it to finish particularly soon
EDIT: Unfortunately the builds failed, I think this might have been too soon after time-machine was introduced. Ah well.
The lack of Blender is now the main thing I miss. The secondary thing I miss is being able to have two HDMI outputs. Oh, well, and suspend. But lack of Blender is def the hardest missing thing rn.
I’m glad the Quasar will solve Blender! I hope it solves suspend too.
Same here. But there’s one saving grace for me: I hate Blender with a passion. I only use it when I have no other choice - meaning that whenever possible, I try very hard to have other choices.
In this case, I’m designing myself custom cross-country ski boots for my non-standard feet, and FreeCAD is just about adequate for the job. Not exactly the right tool, but it’s good enough. And since I plan on adding a hinge mechanism to the boots, at some point I’ll have to fire up FreeCAD anyway. So I might as well use a single tool.
Two HDMI outputs on RK3588 with Pocket Reform are actually possible, there’s just no breakout/port board using the second port yet (it’s between the RCORE carrier and the RK3588 SOM itself, next to the Wi-Fi/BT port). Also, I’m currently working on a mainboard update that includes experimental DisplayPort Alt-Mode for USB-C, so if that works out you’ll be able to get HDMI + DP. I don’t want to overpromise at this point though because while technically feasible, there could still be signal integrity issues with how crowded the board is, and we need to implement the handshake with the monitor over PD protocol to switch to DP.
I still think Blender can be made to run one day on RK3588 when the Geometry Shaders implementation for panvk is done. Faith Ekstrand gave a very informative talk about this at FOSDEM that explains the technical details: FOSDEM 2026 - Geometry shaders in panvk with libpoly
Out of curiosity: Why did you decide to go with Micro HDMI instead of Mini Display Port in the current design,