I've recently downloaded and successfully compiled a small CUDA dll using NVCC (10.2). Unfortunately because I have the most recent toolkit version the distribution requires the most recent driver version too. So I was wondering if there was an NVCC flag that enabled me to effectively target an earlier driver version and then distribute with an older runtime.
Currently, I have to check the run time and driver versions in order to check for compatibility.
The CUDA toolchain, runtime API and its support libraries are versioned and if you build runtime API code with a given toolkit version, you must ship the resulting code with all the libraries from that version or have users install that toolkit version (aka the tensorflow problem).
If you use the driver API, then you can potentially target a lower compute capability with PTX which might be backward compatible with a different driver. I say might because there are still PTX version support limits which can stop it from working correctly.
If you want to support older CUDA versions, just install the older toolchain and build using that toolkit.