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I recently bought a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB). I wanted to test Blender 2.8 on it, but I am unable to get it running.

If I install the 2.79 stable version from the app store or terminal, it works perfectly. However, I am unable to run the Blender 2.8 beta.

I extracted the archive and double clicked on the blender binary, but its not running. I tried copying the extracted files to /usr/bin/ or /usr/local/ and tried running it again, but, still its not running.

Unlike ubuntu, in Raspbian Buster, the binary doesn't have the option to enable 'run as a program'. Tried running from terminal using ./blender, but still nothing happens. Shows 'exec error: unable to execute binary'

Raspberry Pi 4 has arm7l (32 bit) architecture. But, both the 2.79 and 2.8 builds (32 bit) don't seem to work.

Any ideas on how to get 2.8 running?

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  • $\begingroup$ I just ordered a pi3 to run blender. For those asking why you'd want to do that, you can run it headless (no UI) and use something like CrowdRender to share the CPU cores. I'm building a 10-pi render farm to add 40 cores to my system. Renders go lighting fast and the whole thing costs under $500 $\endgroup$
    – Evlas1013
    Jan 19, 2020 at 12:57

3 Answers 3

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I used KALI Linux raspbian build, and apt install blender, and blender2.8 worked (however, it was REALLY laggy - 0.3fps with default scene, 2 minutes rendering the default scene with 1-sample Eevee, 2.5 minutes startup) on raspberryPi3 - so it should also work on raspberryPi4.

Edit: Tested multiple times. Things are not so bad on a raspberry pi 4: sometimes the viewport is almost fluid, blender 2.82 (unfortunately, with no denoising) is available.

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  • $\begingroup$ I tried 2.8 on Kali Linux in my RPi 4. It works! But, as you said its very laggy. Anyway, thanks for the info! $\endgroup$
    – Salai V V
    Sep 26, 2019 at 6:16
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Blender 2.80 requires at least OpenGL 3.3 to run its UI. I don't think Raspberry Pi 4 supports that. It says:

OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics

at https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/specifications/

That does not look like OpenGL 3.3 to me.

As for 2.79, maybe you are not trying the correct build suitable for ARM processors. See this answer.

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  • $\begingroup$ Yeah, I saw that. But, it's working anyway! $\endgroup$
    – Salai V V
    Sep 26, 2019 at 6:17
  • $\begingroup$ May I ask just out of interest - why do you want to run it on such weak hardware? How do you find use for it? $\endgroup$ Sep 26, 2019 at 9:40
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The solution is to use mesa's software rendering:

LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 blender

Does the trick, though it's a very unsatisfying experience, even with 8 gigs of RAM. So, the rpi4 CAN run blender 2.8+, please stop spreading rumors.

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