Determining if your kernel and hardware is 32bit or 64bit on Unix environments

HP UNIX

This technote explains how to establish if an HP-UX® 11.x kernel is 32-bit or 64-bit capable.

Run getconf KERNEL_BITS on the system in question. The output, either "32" or "64", corresponds to 32-bit or 64-bit kernels, respectively.

# getconf KERNEL_BITS
64

Check the vmunix file for the following entries:

# file /stand/vmunix
/stand/vmunix: PA-RISC1.1 executable ---> 32-bit
/stand/vmunix: ELF-64 executable object file ---> 64-bit

This will tell you if your currently running kernel is 64 bits or 32 bits.It returns the number of bits used by the kernel for pointer and long data types.

# getconf KERNEL_BITS
64

Returns which kernel is supported on the hardware.

# getconf HW_32_64_CAPABLE
1

This will show you if the CPU’s are capable of running 32, 64, or 32/64 bit kernels.

# getconf HW_CPU_SUPP_BITS
64

SOLARIS

The easiest way to determine which version is running on your system is to use the isainfo command. This new command prints information about the application environments supported on the system.

The following is an example of the isainfo command executed on an UltraSPARC™ system running the 64-bit operating system:

% isainfo -v
64-bit sparcv9 applications
32-bit sparc applications

One useful option of the isainfo(1) command is the -n option, which prints the native instruction set of the running platform:

% isainfo -n
sparcv9

The -b option prints the number of bits in the address space ( cpu’s bit size capabilities ) of the corresponding native applications environment :

% isainfo -b
64

% echo "Welcome to "`isainfo -b`"-bit Solaris"
Welcome to 64-bit Solaris

A related command, isalist(1), that is more suited for use in shell scripts, can be used to print the complete list of supported instruction sets on the platform. Some of the instruction set architectures listed by isalist are highly platform specific, while isainfo(1) describes only the attributes of the most portable application environments on the system. Both commands are built on the SI_ISALIST suboption of the sysinfo(2) system call. See isalist(5) for further details.

The following is an example of the isalist command executed on an UltraSPARC system running the 64-bit operating system:

% isalist
sparcv9+vis sparcv9 sparcv8plus+vis sparcv8plus sparcv8
sparcv8-fsmuld sparcv7 sparc


AIX

For AIX, we will use the bootinfo command . The below command's shows if the hardware is 32 bit or 64 capable.

# bootinfo -y
64

# getconf HARDWARE_BITMODE
64

# prtconf -c
CPU Type: 64-bit

Below commands show the running kernel’s bit size :

# bootinfo -K
64

# prtconf -k
Kernel Type: 64-bit

# getconf KERNEL_BITMODE
64

LINUX

For linux, we will look at the cpuinfo from /proc. Here, we are mainly interested in the “flags” for the CPU’s:

# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -i flags
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 lahf_lm

We are interested in three values in the output, as they indicate the bit size capabilities of the CPU:

16 Bit = rm (Real Mode)
32 Bit = tm (Transparent Mode)
64 Bit = lm (Long Mode)

This doesn’t necessarily mean the Motherboard is capable of 64 bit.

To determine the bit size of your running kernel, you can also use getconf, similar to HPUX, to find this info:

# getconf LONG_BIT
64

This shows that my kernel is running 64 bit.