Musician and Blender user selecting distribution

[tavasti]

Because I have too much hobbies and not enough time for them, I have decided to pick one more. Started learning Blender

My computer was HP SFF box, not suitable for having real GPU, unless picking this way and even that would not work with bigger cards (picture is not mine, screenshot from some marketplace someone selling 'gaming pc')

paskaksvakioitu_crop.jpg (43.24 KiB) Viewed 108242 times

So I got 'new' computer with tower case. I had spare AMD Radeon Vega 64 card from kids, so I put that in. Installed Devuan, and there is drivers for that card. But for Blender GPU rendering, driver version is too low, and not even Debian Sid has higher version. So I need some other option. Blender would need ROCm >= 5.3 or AMD closed driver >= 22.10. I would be reluctant to change distribution, but looks like I must reconsider.

Spotted options this far:
1) Ubuntu: there is AMD closed drivers for it. I just don't like Ubuntu, software installed with snap, and all that it tries to be Windows of Linux world. I have used Ubuntu over one decade, so I am familiar with it, just jumped out from it when I had to move on from 18.04

2) Arch: seems to have even 2 different ROCm versions fulfilling need. Question mark goes to music software side:

• no kxstudio, so have to get all that stuff from elsewhere. For quick look, it might have all I need, but not sure really
• no winehq support, so how to get recent wine for using windows plugins with yabridge
• how to install Bitwig to Arch? Bitwig offers ubuntu package (works ok in devuan) and Flatpak. I don't want Flatpak, I need possibility to use plugins from anywhere in filesystem
• I assume installing Mixbus would be ok

3) I am seasoned linux pro, so sure I can build recent ROCm myself! Took quick look yesterday, rocm repo does not have build instructions, just instructions for building docs. And that build of docs fail on some errors

4) Just get some second hand Nvidia card

5) Forget gpu rendering, render with cpu on second computer. If it takes week, so what? I won't be able to make so much material that rendering would be bigger bottleneck than my own work. But sure, if after one week of rendering, finding out that something small should be changed? And that repeats few times...

Comments, what would be wall I should hit my head? And extra thing on selecting, I would be happy to have distribution without systemd.

[glowrak guy]

Centos 7 will be supported 'til mid 2024, and was the default distro for Davinci Resolve 3D software. So maybe some Blender interest also migrated to that RedHat ecosystem, in the way of human 3D forum support, and utilities for 3D that might also benefit Blender users?

Also, AVLinux has a build of Cinelerra installed in /opt and a new AVLinux may appear sometime soon, perhaps with newer
support libs and video tools. Cinelerra team had some medical issues, as I recall, so this release is picking up
where things were left hanging for a while...

'Rocky Linux', a replacement for Centos, named after a Centos developer who died, might also be of interest:

https://rockylinux.org/about

Cheers

[tavasti]

Centos 7 will be supported 'til mid 2024, and was the default distro for Davinci Resolve 3D software. So maybe some Blender interest also migrated to that RedHat ecosystem, in the way of human 3D forum support, and utilities for 3D that might also benefit Blender users?

'Rocky Linux', a replacement for Centos, named after a Centos developer who died, might also be of interest:

https://rockylinux.org/about

RHEL based/related are made for server usage, and not really much for desktop. Getting music software for them might be hard? Same checklist I was presenting for Arch would apply also for those. For ADM drivers, possibly those closed drivers could work on Rocky, but I still suspect this is not right direction.

Also, AVLinux has a build of Cinelerra installed in /opt and a new AVLinux may appear sometime soon, perhaps with newer
support libs and video tools. Cinelerra team had some medical issues, as I recall, so this release is picking up
where things were left hanging for a while...

AVLinux is based on debian/debian derivative MX, so hard to imagine there would be more recent ROCm packages than debian sid has?

[glowrak guy]

The CCRMA project at Stanford university was an early pioneer of linux audio. I used their repository in many
Fedora installations over the years.

These days, Fedora Jam is a red-hat based media distro, and server kudos aside, there are Blender users,
here's a 25 minute tutorial from one of them, making an actual 3D red hat

https://youtu.be/AiU43XvKE6w

Cheers

[tavasti]

From a friend got plenty of information about Arch, and it looked very potential. Installed it to test system, and installation to old school linux user was fine, using command-line tools to setup system. Installing that way sure teaches you much how system is built.

With Q9550 (or something like that), Arch-built blender died in startup to error 'illegal instruction' so sounds like it was optimized for more recent cpu. Blender.org downloaded blender started, but then it freezed totally when opening gpu rendering settings. Ok, maybe too old computer, moved disk to i7-3820 machine. There blender.org downloaded blender started like in older one, but here when opening gpu rendering settings whole computer died, not even answering ping. Does not look like this is solution.

Next thing to test, Ubuntu.

[tavasti]

With Ubuntu and AMD closed drivers, I can turn on GPU rendering, and it starts rendering! And then Blender crashes, with error message ‘Memory access fault, Reason: Page not present or supervisor privilege’.

This looks like I need to get Nvidia GPU if I want to have such for blender use.

[GMaq]

Hi,

I can't speak specifically to your exact hardware and driver situation but MX Linux even though based on Debian Stable is very proactive with new Video Drivers and Firmwares and often backports from Sid.. Surely what you want will enter Sid soon?

What exactly is the issue? I am including Blender 4.0.2 in AV Linux 23 and on all my test machines with decent AMD cards it seems to run as expected although I an no Blender expert... Also Blender for Video Editing specifically? Sure it does it but is that function alone that much better than Kdenlive or Cinelerra-GG?

Cinelerra-GG is horribly underrated and stained by it's bad but now ancient Cinelerra-CV reputation, it is an incredibly powerful Editor in my experience and I've easily published 30+ complex multitrack Videos with it... Throwing out a perfectly good Distribution for one workflow out of many other choices seems like the tail wagging the dog to me..

An old pic:

[tavasti]

I can't speak specifically to your exact hardware and driver situation but MX Linux even though based on Debian Stable is very proactive with new Video Drivers and Firmwares and often backports from Sid.. Surely what you want will enter Sid soon?

Arch had what was wanted, and it did have bug. And if Sid had that, I could get that directly or building myself to more stable debian/devuan system.

But then, my last test with Ubuntu revealed state: code in Blender for this particular GPU card is not stable, so living without or getting Nvidia card is way to go. Sure, blender code for more recent Radeon cards might be in better shape, but in discussions people say that Radeon-linux code is not par with Windows code, partially because drivers in Linux are slacking behind, fetures not coming in same pace as in windows driver. And anyway, using those other Radeon cards in linux would mean needing bug fixes in os drivers or using closed drivers in ubuntu. For nvidia, closed drivers but they are available for debian also.

What exactly is the issue? I am including Blender 4.0.2 in AV Linux 23 and on all my test machines with decent AMD cards it seems to run as expected although I an no Blender expert... Also Blender for Video Editing specifically?

It is about 3D modeling and animation. Rendering them takes pretty long, and having GPU would speed up it. Normal usage works ok, rendering with GPU not.

Here is examples I have done in these my early learning stages.

Lighthouse, started rendering with Cycles-engine, first 2 seconds done with it. Whole 10s video would render with cpu something like 20 hours. With lighter Eevee engine (rest of the video) was faster, 8s took maybe one hour...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHpSZUNUYto

Another, here did not even try using cycles. Maybe 1.5 hours rendering with Eevee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QGK4z2k7kk

For just editing video I don't think Blender is best option, there is easier video editors. Sure if you are blender guru, then using it for video editing might be ok. But for learning point of view, it might be feeling something like chopping firewood with excavator.

[tavasti]

With Ubuntu and AMD closed drivers, I can turn on GPU rendering, and it starts rendering! And then Blender crashes, with error message ‘Memory access fault, Reason: Page not present or supervisor privilege’.

This looks like I need to get Nvidia GPU if I want to have such for blender use.

Good news! With those closed drivers and Blender 3.6 LTS GPU rendering actually seems to work. Not going to moon with it, but getting like 5x speed with my test project.

[tavasti]

Good news! With those closed drivers and Blender 3.6 LTS GPU rendering actually seems to work. Not going to moon with it, but getting like 5x speed with my test project.

And now find out where tha crash happens. When rendering something where material is emitting light, gpu rendering will crash. For example lighthouse or torches in dungeon...

But yeah, 5x difference in speed might not be worth all the hassle and limitations.

[tavasti]

And now find out where tha crash happens. When rendering something where material is emitting light, gpu rendering will crash. For example lighthouse or torches in dungeon...

There is also other things that cause crash. Have to admit, Vega 64 + Linux is just not working combination for Blender use.

And to get some meaningfull speed-up, would need at least Nvidia RTX 2060 or better.