How to determine if your Solaris Kernel is 32 or 64 bit?

Patching systems is a routine task for many a systems administrator. We simply download a patch or series of patches, evalute them and apply them to a server. However, when it comes to Solaris recommended patch clusters, we have to determine whether we need the 32-bit or 64-bit patch sets for a given system, as currently Sun ships both versions.

So the $64,000 question, is how do you find out which one is appropriate for your platform? Simple, lets use the isainfo command.

From the "man" page, the isainfo utility is used to identify various attributes of the instruction set architectures supported on the currently running system.

The following examples were run on a Solaris erver with a 64-bit kernel.

$ isainfo -b
    64

The -b option prints the number of bits in the address space of the native instruction set. In the above example we see "64 bits".

$ isainfo -kv
    64-bit sparcv9 kernel modules

The -k option prints the name of the instruction set used by the operating system kernel components. In the above output, we see "sparcv9". Likewise, the -v flag provides more detailed information, In the above example "64-bit sparcv9".