ARM support

Here’s one for the very more technical…

Now Blender has plans to pull itself out from the shadows and become a more pro application (great news all round) is it at all likely the ARM branch of the code will be updated now and then?

A while back I built up a large pi farm for throwing all my rendering at, it works great, but it’s been stuck in 2.78 land for a while now. 2.79 and indeed 2.8 have brought some really big updates to rendering, quality and speed. These updates would make farm ARM rendering even more viable.

I’m certainly not technical enough to look at building a branch myself, would not know where to start. But I have coded large systems in the past and can imagine the work involved.

However, I wondered this morning if it would be possible - maybe even easier - to separate the render code and have a smaller install just for this purpose. It’s just an idea, don’t shoot me down in flames!

On a unix farm all the rendering is set off by command line so there’s no need for the gui. Well, you’d have it on one node for finalising file paths, that’s it.

Just an idea. I’d be happy to help all I could if others thought this might be an idea. Of course if I’m a voice of one there’s not much point and I’ll relegate the farm to the cobwebs. Or sell it to a university I suppose. I’d be sad to see the back of it.

Anyway, what do we think?

Thanks.

The idea is sound, but I though that when you for exmpale run Blender from comand line with the needed switches (eg rendering command lines) it does just that and nothing more.

Guessing the bigger concern is that to simply fit the entire package on the respective SD cards?

Also does blender Cycles render run on ARM?

Ahh, totally forgot about this thread.
It might be worth to look t what Render sheep did with it’s client I believe they separated the renderer from the GUI.