Blender on Talos II and Fedora Workstation

[dgcreations]

Hi, I'm new to the Linux world and new Talos II user, a bit using Raspberry Pi, from 1993 to 2005 I used Amiga 68k and PPC systems, for a short time Windows on x86 and since 2006 Mac intel, the latest arrival was the MacMini M1 that I mainly use with the Blender that I am learning to use. I got closer to the Amiga world in October of last year and I learned about the Raptor's OpenHardware cards so that I was firing the BlackBird. Power Architecture fascinates me a lot, so that looking for information on these cards I found a Talos II dual power9 (4 core) on a used market in Italy, so I bought it and now here I am. Yesterday I assembled the card with slightly dated hardware just to try it, I installed Fedora Workstation and the first software I installed was Blender that I found on the Fedora graphic store, the version is 2.91.1, therefore very recent, I used it on a Shappire HD3450 graphics card, but also moving or rotating the cube that is displayed when Blender is opened is slow and jerky, probably the system cannot take advantage of the graphics card I have mounted but I thought that the Very powerful CPU could still make the movement smooth. On the advice of a friend I disabled Wayland and on restart Fedora no longer appeared on the pci graphics card but on the integrated graphics, certainly slower than the HD3450 but not that much, in particular with Blender it went slightly slower but I found it more stable, in fact the system with the HD3450 more than once crashed so I assume there is a compatibility problem.
Another thing I noticed that from the Blender preferences under "System" the "Cycles render device" section does not appear in fact the only engine available is eevee, also trying a test rendering of the cube it takes 16 seconds, as time it seems too high compared to the Mac M1, but anyway looking at the system monitor I noticed that the total CPU load is around 10% in fact the CPU fans are running at minimum. I would like to know if any of you use Blender and if you can use 3D acceleration with OpenCL and modern graphics cards and if you can use the Cycles rendering engine and if so how to do it, sorry but I know little about Linux.

[MauryG5]

Guys, I am my friend,  I gave him a hand to look out into the Power world and now he is also part of the family, see if you can help him. I personally do not use Blender but I think it is also the usual problem that we Power users have, namely software optimization for our platform. Then of course for sure I told him that as soon as he can you have to mount a nice graphics card to make everything run much better and then that to use Xorg, he needs to create the xorg.conf.d file with all the graphics card output that mounts.

[dgcreations]

Thanks MauryG5 

[Borley]

I fired up one of my old Blender projects just to test things out. All seems to be working. It sounds like you've already gotten things taken care of although my first guess would have been that your display card has not had the firmware loaded.

[dgcreations]

Thank you for the answer, no I couldn't bring up the Cycles engine, I also sent the command:

$blender -E help

from the terminal and the result is:

Blender Engine Listing:
      BLENDER_EEVEE
      BLENDER_WORKBENCH.

the Cycles engine is missing from the list 
I currently have an old graphics card that Fedora 33 obviously fails to exploit, I would like to buy the Radeon Pro WX7100 that the Talos II supports but before making the purchase I wanted to make sure that I can use it with Blender.
Were you able to use the "Cycles" rendering engine?
If you can please send me some rendering tests with CPU and GPU Cycles of those present on:

https://www.blender.org/download/demo-files/

It is very important for me to know that I can use Blender in all its features, I am willing to lose some performance due to the lack of optimization for Power processors, but I would like to be able to use it with all the features.
While for the rendering speed with the "Eevee" engine the CPU never exceeds 12% of utilization, yet I set very high priority.
What graphics card do you use, is editing in Blender smooth? Thank you very much for your help or who can help me.

[dgcreations]

Yesterday I discovered that the blender engine cycles is an addon that can be deactivated or activated at will. In fact, on the Power version of Blender this addon is missing. The sources exist, so I don't know if there is any specific problem in compiling the addon for our machines.

[tle]

If there are source code, I think you could give it a try to see if you could compile the engine.

[dgcreations]

I contacted the guy who takes care of the Blender build for Fedora, we have been in touch for a week now, he sent me a build 2.92 with the cycles engine active, I tried to render with cycles but Blender suddenly quits.  He said it's a general source file problem ... I didn't quite understand what he meant (I use google translator) however he told me he is preparing the official Build and advised me to install Fedora 34 which should be available  from now.

[ClassicHasClass]

Not sure what that means either. Maybe it's one of the underlying libraries which was fixed or upgraded in F34?

[MauryG5]

Classic has yes it's possible, maybe they made some corrections and made it available directly on Fedora 34 and then recommended dgcreations to update Fedora and try Blender later. I also asked for information through dgcreations, about the problems of MAME on Power and why there are the sources with bugs. They replied that they will possibly do a fix of the MAME sources, starting with Fedora 35, so they will work on it from now on, I hope they will be able to fix these MAME sources after a long time ...

[dgcreations]

I point out that with the latest version of Blender 2.93, the Cycles rendering engine was also enabled on Power (although as announced by the guy who takes care of the build for Power he had mentioned that it would only work with the CPU).
Now I have another problem, from the Blender video sequencer I can't import video clips, I tried the .mov, .mkv and mp4, but it gives me an error, could it be the lack of codecs on Fedora?

[MPC7500]

You can install various codecs (ffmpeg etc.) via e.g. terminal, dnfdragora.