Since Solaris 7 was released any machine with an UltraSPARC
(sun4u) CPU
installed, such as an Ultra 1, 2, E3000, E6500, E10000 etc, could all run
either a 32 bit or 64 bit kernel. Sun has made the step of designing the
64 bit capability to get the most out of their UltraSPARC chips and to
allow very very large limits on what you can do with their machines
If you have a sun4u UltraSPARC
machine then you may be running a 64 bit kernel. You can use:
% uname -m
to determine your chip type. A response of sun4u
means you are running on an UltraSPARC machine.
You can determine the currently running kernel with this command:
% isainfo -v
64-bit sparcv9 applications
32-bit sparc applications
%
As you can see, this machine is able to run 64 bit applications, thus it
has a 64 bit kernel running. If you only saw a 32-bit response or even
"Command not found" then you are running with a 32 bit kernel.
The nice thing about running with a 64 bit kernel, apart from the much
bigger addressing limits, is that you can still use the vast majority of
the 32 bit programs, and in this case, Solaris packages. Often you won't
notice any difference whatsoever in speed, and the operating system works
just the same. That means you can use all the software for a 32 bit
machine, and if you do have a 64 bit package available then you can choose
to install that instead and use that software in native 64 bit mode.
Of course if you have a 32 bit kernel, you can only use the 32 bit
packages.
One does have to be careful with programs that go diving into the kernel
to access information, the top
package being an example. If you use a 32 bit
top on a 64 bit machine it
might just work, but it's more likely to fail or give undefined results.
More information on 32 and 64 packages on Solaris 7 is available
here.