Nvidia Is Withdrawing Linux 32 Bit Support

Nvidia has officially announced that it plans to withdraw support for 32 bit (x86) Linux operating systems at some stage in the future. Nvidia stated that “Future versions of the CUDA toolkit might not be provided for Linux-x86.” As to not cause confusion Nvidia clearly specifies that the withdrawal of 32 bit support is for x86 architecture processors only, ARM processors will continue to have 32 bit (x86) support. For x86 architecture processors running Linux 64 bit (x64) will soon become the standard if Nvidia hardware is used. If support for 32 bit Linux is withdrawn by other hardware vendors then we could see a converging trend of withdrawing support for 32 bit Linux across the board.

The full Nvidia statement is as follows:

• The Linux-x86 version of the CUDA toolkit is still available and supported, today.
• Future versions of the CUDA toolkit might not be provided for Linux-x86.
• The Linux-x86 CUDA driver is included and supported in the NVIDIA Linux-x86 and Linux-x86_64 GPU driver packages, as of the 331.xx release series.
• The CUDA driver might not be included in future releases of the NVIDIA Linux-x86 and Linux-x86_64 GPU driver packages.
• As new CUDA features are introduced in the meantime, they may not be available to 32-bit applications on Linux-x86.
• All of the above also apply to x86 components used on Linux-x86_64.
• This notice applies to x86 architectures only; 32-bit Linux applications are still officially supported and are not deprecated on the ARM architecture.
• This notice does not apply to non-CUDA components of the NVIDIA Linux GPU driver package.

Image courtesy of Geek.com