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Once again, well known and great developer Casper Dik from Sun Microsystems give us an interesting answer on the fact that there is not 32-bit emulation in the Solaris OS when running a 64-bit kernel, and why most installed binaries seems to be compiled as 32-bit executables, even if you boot on a 64-bit platform, as in the following example:

# isainfo -kv
64-bit amd64 kernel modules
# file /usr/bin/ls
/usr/bin/ls:    ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386 Version 1 [FPU], dynamically linked, \
 not stripped, no debugging information available

Here is the explanation, shown as a little Q&A:

Q: Once I boot it in 64bit mode, i'd have to run emulation libraries to run 32bit bins right?

A: No; you run the exact same binaries and libraries under 32 and 64 bit. It's not emulation; it's basically two syscall entry tables one for 32 bit and one for 64 bit, mostly sharing the same code except where pointer sizes matter.

Q: Since it will be a very light server (only bare binaries to run my req.s) they probably end up most likely all being 64bit?

A: No, most binaries are 32 bit only those that need to be 64 bit are 64 bit.

Q: so you are saying that i can run both 32bit and 64bit code simultaneously, natively with the solaris kernel? That's pretty damn cool

A: Correct. There are several reasons for an OS which generally comes in binary distributions to do so:

• maintain complete binary compatibility with old applications (and yes, closed source does matter, even to a lot of Linux customers).
• allows a single distribution to work on both 32 and 64 bit systems of the same architecture.

As a last note, it is interesting to see that a full install of SXCE snv_70 provide 1188 32-bit files and only 82 64-bit files in the following paths /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/openwin/bin, /usr/ucb, /usr/sfw/bin, and /opt/SUNWspro/bin. The 64-bit files are mostly stored in a specific architecture subdirectory; i.e. amd64 in this case, while some of them are provided as both 32-bit and 64-bit incarnations:

# file /usr/bin/pfiles /usr/bin/amd64/pfiles
/usr/bin/pfiles:        ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386 Version 1 [FPU], \
 dynamically linked, not stripped, no debugging information available
/usr/bin/amd64/pfiles:  ELF 64-bit LSB executable AMD64 Version 1 [SSE FXSR FPU], \
 dynamically linked, not stripped, no debugging information available

Update #1: 2008-04-07

Be sure to consult the excellent 64-bit FAQ for Solaris.