NVIDIA dropping support for 32bit Linux this month, also dropping Fermi series support

I have some old Linux games that are 32 bits only, but it doesn't matter, I will use the Windows port with Wine. I already start this method with some games that run better with Wine than the Linux port today, Heretic II for example.


Last edited by legluondunet on 10 April 2018 at 12:01 pm UTC

I have some old Linux games that are 32 bits only, but it doesn't matter, I will use the Windows port with Wine. I already start this method with some games that run better with Wine than the Linux port today, Heretic II for example.

Unless I am mistaken you still need the 32-bit OpenGL libraries to run 32-bit Windows games in WINE.

Unless I am mistaken you still need the 32-bit OpenGL libraries to run 32-bit Windows games in WINE.

Even with the 64 bits version of Wine?

Unless I am mistaken you still need the 32-bit OpenGL libraries to run 32-bit Windows games in WINE.

Even with the 64 bits version of Wine?

Yes. You need 32-bit libs to run 32-bit Windows software in WINE.

A pure 64-bit Linux system running 64-bit WINE could only run 64-bit Windows programs.


Last edited by thelimeydragon on 10 April 2018 at 12:32 pm UTC

:lol:
Oh, please. What comes next? Starving children in Africa?
It's not like we're talking about having to buy high-end machines for 1.5k €...
Pretty much everything you can buy today for pretty cheap is 64bit.

You're aware there's people who do not have money for anything except the essential?

Sorry, I had to do that ;)

I really don't see how someone who can barely afford their own food is relevant in a discussion about anything Steam-related.
It's not like that person will have too much money to spend on Steam games.

Anyone who can regularly afford to buy a game can afford 64bit hardware.
Again, it's not like you could actually buy anything that isn't 64bit - except smartphones, but even those are now (slowly) switching to 64bit.

Well, technically,someone who is having problems buying food could have had a good paying job in the past and a steam account with a bunch of games in it. They may not being able to afford new games but they should be allowed to access their existing games. (and actually having older games would be a reason why they need 32 bit support.)

--

While processors have been capable of 64 bit operations for at least 15 years now, even older computers should not have a problem with 64 bit processing. Most computers that can't either are likely to be really obsolete, or small tablet or appliance type computers, not a general purpose computer or laptop likely to run a full fledged distro. (I am sure there may be exceptions put in my earlier example of the 12 year old AMD Sempron... Sempron was the low end of the performance curve and it supports it. (the 1st 1 gHz AMD Athlon shipped in Feb 2000... so we are talking nearly 20 years of 64 bit CPUs; remember atholons < 1 Ghz also could run 64 bits.)

--

All that being said... if you want to run 32 bit, you can. You just will not get updates anymore. 64 bits can run on pretty much any computer from the last 20 years... if you want to stay 32 bits, it is not realistic to be supported with the latest releases and you can stay on older drivers/releases.

--

That being said, steam currently uses 32 bits... so do many of the games on steam.. even some of the recent ones. As pointed out by others 32 bit processing may be necessary. Basically, this can be done through interfaces the pose as 32 bit libraries, upconvert the addresses and variables from 32 to 64 bits, call the 64 bit equivalent, then downconvert the results to be returned to the calling program. Of course these libraries will still need to be supported to account for any changes in the 64 bit libraries.

Anyone who can regularly afford to buy a game can afford 64bit hardware.

This is obviously not the case. First, I am a counterexample, as I had mentioned to MIRV pages above. Therefore you are empirically wrong. Second, a game on sale on Steam costs $10-20 (Cdn) or less per game. A new game computer to replace my old one costs $1500-2000 (Cdn). It is very easy to be in a situation in which one can afford the occasional $10 but not $1000+; what on earth is odd about this concept? Note that a thousand dollars is a hundred times as big as ten dollars. Two thousand dollars is two hundred times as big as ten dollars. Often, people who can afford x cannot afford 200x. Now you know; if you have been having problems with budgeting, perhaps this news may help you in the future.
Apologies for the sarcasm, but I think people leading with big posters of "Won't somebody please think of the children" (without a question mark, for some reason) while talking obvious nonsense are kind of asking for a bit, eh?


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 10 April 2018 at 11:26 pm UTC

Sorry, I had to do that ;)

It's good that you haven't been in the situation. I don't wish it to anybody. But I wish enough phantasy and empathy to everybody to imagine it, and, as a result, not making jokes about it. To be clear: not funny.

Therefore you are empirically wrong.

Agreeing with what you're saying, just for the obvious complaint, you should have taken a minimal 500 bucks box as example.

Well, technically,someone who is having problems buying food could have had a good paying job in the past and a steam account with a bunch of games in it. They may not being able to afford new games but they should be allowed to access their existing games. (and actually having older games would be a reason why they need 32 bit support.)

And nobody is denying that. Old versions should continue to work - and why won't they? E.g. Steam, other than possible changes to server APIs for newer versions, but even those could be backported to 32bit versions or the API could have two versions available.
This is about upgrading for the new stuff that requires it.

Anyone who can regularly afford to buy a game can afford 64bit hardware.

This is obviously not the case. First, I am a counterexample, as I had mentioned to MIRV pages above. Therefore you are empirically wrong. Second, a game on sale on Steam costs $10-20 (Cdn) or less per game. A new game computer to replace my old one costs $1500-2000 (Cdn). It is very easy to be in a situation in which one can afford the occasional $10 but not $1000+; what on earth is odd about this concept? Note that a thousand dollars is a hundred times as big as ten dollars. Two thousand dollars is two hundred times as big as ten dollars. Often, people who can afford x cannot afford 200x. Now you know; if you have been having problems with budgeting, perhaps this news may help you in the future.
Apologies for the sarcasm, but I think people leading with big posters of "Won't somebody please think of the children" (without a question mark, for some reason) while talking obvious nonsense are kind of asking for a bit, eh?

First of all, who the hell needs to spend ~1000€ to upgrade their years old 32bit piece to support 64bit?!
For 1000€ at this day, you get a PC that is capable of running all the latest games (except maybe unoptimized stuff like Kingdom Come or Star Citizen...) on high settings. And you can get that for much cheaper by assembling it yourself and/or using used parts and/or sales, etc. With some time investment, one can cut the cost of a whole PC in half. But that is something you don't even need.
I said "64bit hardware", not "64bit machine beasts" or even whole PCs.
What determines the 32bit or 64bit support? For those who don't know, it is the CPU. Only the CPU. Well, and if you want the motherboard by extension, as the CPU has to fit there. I'm sure there are ancient motherboards that could not fit a many years old 64bit CPU. But if your rig is that ancient, even a $300 rig from ebay will be a significant upgrade.
Anyway, at the very maximum you'd need a CPU, a motherboard and 2-4GB of RAM (if you were below 8 before). And none of that has to be the newest stuff. 5-10 years old pieces of those already support 64bit. We're talking flea market territory here. No way you couldn't find something like that for under $300.
The way you made it sound, you got one hell of a rig that only supports 32bit, though. That is definitely a big WTF?!, but it also means it cannot be that old and you only need a new CPU.

And all you have to do for $300 is not buy a game on sale for up to 30 times. I'm sure there are enough games in your library to keep spirits up during that harsh time.
If you cannot do that, I am fairly sure it is you who has problems with budgeting, not me - I happen to have a job that teaches me to be rather good with it as well as paying my bills. You should try it one of these days - or maybe you are a student. Depending on the country, those can be way more poor than just unemployed people. Ask me about Finland - but even here, there are student loans.

It is definitely news to me that poverty makes you blind to logic, knowledge about hardware or reading comprehension. Or maybe you are just angry at people who can afford things? Or you just wanted to get that elitist prick off his high horse? Sorry to tell you, but I bought the horse armor DLC. You gotta try harder.

Sorry, I had to do that ;)

It's good that you haven't been in the situation. I don't wish it to anybody. But I wish enough phantasy and empathy to everybody to imagine it, and, as a result, not making jokes about it. To be clear: not funny.

I haven't been in the situation of living on a shoestring budget? Weird, I seem to remember doing that for 2,5 years while learning to become a programmer... I have been, and I was able to afford something after months of saving up for it (I remember buying a Wii).
I'm thankful for the experience, as it made me stronger. It also gave me a strong dislike of cheap spaghetti...

I'm also living with my GF who has to do that RIGHT NOW (students in Finland, oh dear...) - and she would NOT accept my help, she's paying her part of everything. And she has already grown stronger from the experience.

You only seem to use poverty as an excuse.
It is not.
And by reassuring someone in that situation that it is an excuse, you aren't helping them, you just strengthen the excuse.

To be clear: I don't give a rat's *** what you find funny or not. I despise "nice" people who make themselves feel better by being "oh so supportive" and "oh so empathic" towards people in a bad spot, not realizing they only do it to make themselves feel good about it.
I may not be a nice person, but at least I don't pretend.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 11 April 2018 at 8:09 am UTC

Anyone who can regularly afford to buy a game can afford 64bit hardware.

This is obviously not the case. First, I am a counterexample, as I had mentioned to MIRV pages above. Therefore you are empirically wrong. Second, a game on sale on Steam costs $10-20 (Cdn) or less per game. A new game computer to replace my old one costs $1500-2000 (Cdn). It is very easy to be in a situation in which one can afford the occasional $10 but not $1000+; what on earth is odd about this concept? Note that a thousand dollars is a hundred times as big as ten dollars. Two thousand dollars is two hundred times as big as ten dollars. Often, people who can afford x cannot afford 200x. Now you know; if you have been having problems with budgeting, perhaps this news may help you in the future.
Apologies for the sarcasm, but I think people leading with big posters of "Won't somebody please think of the children" (without a question mark, for some reason) while talking obvious nonsense are kind of asking for a bit, eh?

First of all, who the hell needs to spend ~1000€ to upgrade their years old 32bit piece to support 64bit?!

So if you are paying so little attention that I'm explicitly saying "$ Cdn" and then you come back at me with Euros, it's clear you have no room in your head for both making sense and your specially armoured high horse. No, in Canada three hundred bucks is not remotely realistic. Yes, if you're a computer nerd you have expertise which allows you to get computers cheap. Congratulations, I am not worthy etc etc., but other people have other expertise and interests and the cost in time to learn how to do it the cheap way is greater than the cost of buying retail. If that makes no sense to you, explain to me how you do your own car repairs, electrician work and plumbing among other things.

Yes, when you're a penniless student you can fairly easily save up for frivolous things. That is because you're a kid with no responsibilities. I have a family, kids getting married I have to help out, grandkids. In short, I do have responsibilities and it would be irresponsible of me at this time to waste my money on a new computer. At some point in the future I expect I will be able to buy a new computer; that day is not today and it would not suddenly become today if I had the benefit of your oh-so-magical expertise. Maybe when you grow up you'll understand.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 11 April 2018 at 9:07 am UTC

...

Out of curiosity what is your CPU?

less /proc/cpuinfo


Last edited by thelimeydragon on 11 April 2018 at 9:22 am UTC

Fermi should still be supported in the legacy branch which should be fine. Like this it's still possible to use it on modern kernels. Or are they going to totally drop it? In that case I might stay with the latest working OS on my "lan PC".


It's about time they kick x86 - from a Software developers perspective it's a burden to be backwards compatible for ages and carrying along too much overhead. Almost every computer since 2004 or even before that can handle x64. So what's the deal? Steam even started to be well-known when x64 was a thing anyway.


Whatsoever, someone who doesn't have appropriate hardware but can't afford it should let himself gift something.


I gave a lot of Core i3 1st generation Hardware to people including 8 GB RAM etc. - if you add a cheap graphics card it can handle modern OSes and decent games.

Not only games, PCSX2, the famous PS2 emulator is 32 bits only.


Last edited by legluondunet on 11 April 2018 at 9:38 pm UTC

Does this mean they'll stop releasing 32-bit drivers altogether? So let's say Nvidia blob users won't be able to run 32-bit games anymore (including in Wine)? That's quite a huge amount of games really.


Last edited by Shmerl on 12 April 2018 at 4:43 am UTC

For the record... I just bought Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition on steam. It was released about 2 weeks ago. (A remake of a 15 year old game.)

Despite being 2 weeks old... it requires 32 bit libraries.

NWN:EE 1.74 should run on any recent Linux distribution, but will likely require some 32bit packages installed. These instructions are on a best-effort basis. You will likely have to adapt them to the Linux distribution of your choice.

The following components need to be available on your system:

* OpenAL
* GL (likely provided by your 3rd-party GPU driver, or by the X11 driver-package)

Again, please note that all of these need to be available in their 32bit variant. For 64bit Linux installs, there’s usually a way to install 32bit packages (either by using multiarch support or by installing separately-named packages).

For Ubuntu (16.04 64bit), to satisfy all install requirements, do this:

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install lib32stdc++6
$ sudo apt install libopenal1:i386

Respectively, for 32 bit installs, you can omit the add-architecture step and the :i386 postfixes.

When in doubt, use ldd to find out which libraries you are missing:

$ ldd nwmain-linux
linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xf77d8000)
libGL.so.1 => not found
libopenal.so.1 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libopenal.so.1 (0xf14bf000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0xf14ba000)
libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libstdc++.so.6 (0xf1343000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0xf12ee000)
libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xf12d0000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0xf12b3000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0xf10fd000)
librt.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/librt.so.1 (0xf10f4000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf77d9000)

For other distributions, please refer to their user manual or package manager.

So even if you are using 64 bit distro... you will still need 32 bit libraries in order to play games that came out last month.

That being said... If the 64 bit drivers install and allow 32 bit access through an interface, we should be ok with future updating.

What the heck, guys? Of course you can still run x86 applications, including Steam, games and emulators.


The only thing you can't do is installing the driver on a x86 distribution. They get abandoned anyway, no one needs them anymore so there's no reason to over react here.

Does this mean they'll stop releasing 32-bit drivers altogether? So let's say Nvidia blob users won't be able to run 32-bit games anymore (including in Wine)? That's quite a huge amount of games really.

No. It was already said somewhere that 32 bit libraries needed to run 32 bit software on 64 bit distribution would be unaffected.

Just to add a bit of info.
According to winehq, there are many 64-bit applications that still include 32-bit components.

I forget the exact quote, but I even got an email reply from a Grip dev, stating that their 64-bit game uses 32-bit components.


Last edited by solar_dome on 14 April 2018 at 1:35 am UTC