SUMMARY: Enabling 64 bit architecture

From: Michael_Steeves (msteeves@bbn.com)
Date: Mon Aug 23 1999 - 09:58:50 CDT


Thanks to the following people for their responses:
Casper Dik <casper@holland.sun.com>
Jed <jed@megalink.net>
Michael Allmen <mike.allmen@motorola.com>
Kevin Sheehan <kevin@joltin.com>
Otto, Doug <otto@alldata.com>
Timothy Lindgren <Timothy_Lindgren@enron.com>

The original question was:

> We have an Enterprise 450 system that's got OBP rev 3.12.2. Someone
> heard somewhere that you needed to have a newer PROM rev in order to
> enable the 64-bit part of the OS (otherwise it'd be running in 32-bit
> mode). I can't find anything on this one way or the other, and am
> somewhat curious to know if a) this is true, and b) where I can get
> info on what version I'd need to upgrade to in order to enable the
> 64-bit architecture.

The answer I got was that for the most part, Solaris 7 should prompt
you for it during the install (I wasn't with the company when this
system was first set up), and Doug Otto thought that the PROM upgrade
was only for the Ultra 1.

After checking docs.sun.com (per the advice of one of Kevin Sheehan),
I found (in the Solaris 7 System Administration Guide, Volume 1) the
following commands to tell you if you're able to run in 64-bit mode,
and to tell you what mode your kernel is running in.

To see if you can run the 64-bit version of Solaris, you need to be
running an UltraSPARC system (uname -m for this), or if you use the
psrinfo command from Solaris 7, you want to see that you have a
sparcv9 processor type.

To see what kernel you're running, there's a command that will give
you this (isainfo -v), that will tell you right away.

Sun also recommends that you check boot(1m) and the Solaris 7 (SPARC
Platform Edition) Release Notes.

-Mike

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