Is my processor 64 or 32 bit?

Question

I am on Ubuntu and I did this command:

$ uname -a
Linux slabrams-desktop 2.6.32-29-generic #58-Ubuntu SMP Fri Feb 11 19:00:09 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux

Does it mean I am on 32bit or 64 bit processor?

The reason I am trying to figure this out is that I was getting errors which looked like this:

cannot execute binary file

and from Googling, I thought it was a processor issue. Any ideas?

Answer 1

It means that you're running a 32-bit kernel, which means that you can only run 32-bit apps without the use of an emulator or virtualization.

If you want to see if your processor is 64-bit then look for lm in the flags listed in /proc/cpuinfo.

Answer 2

You can use lscpu. Output looks something like this for 64 bit processors:

someuser@somelaptop:~$ lscpu
Architecture:          i686
CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
CPU(s):                4
Thread(s) per core:    2
Core(s) per socket:    2
CPU socket(s):         1
Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel
CPU family:            6
Model:                 37
Stepping:              5
CPU MHz:               1199.000
Virtualisation:        VT-x
L1d cache:             32K
L1i cache:             32K
L2 cache:              256K
L3 cache:              3072K

Answer 3

You can also check the architecture of the binary you're trying to run by using file: file filetocheck. It will mention either 32-bit or 64-bit.