How to confirm the 64bit capability of your CPU in Linux

How to confirm the 64bit capability of your CPU in Linux

Based on /proc/cpuinfo file, it is quite easy to confirm whether your CPU is capable of 64bit or not. All you have to do is look at the flags which tell you what instruction sets your CPU is capable of.

All  the CPUs on your system will have the same type and therefore support the same instruction sets, that's why in this example the grep command returns 4 similar lines – for the 4 CPU instances found on my system:

newserver# grep flags /proc/cpuinfo
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm pni monitor ds_cpl cid cx16 xtpr
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm pni monitor ds_cpl cid cx16 xtpr
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm pni monitor ds_cpl cid cx16 xtpr
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm pni monitor ds_cpl cid cx16 xtpr

What you're looking for is the following flag: lm. It stands for X86_FEATURE_LM, the Long Mode (64bit) support. If you can find the "lm" flag among your CPU flags, this means you're looking at a 64bit capable processor.

As you can see from the example about, the processors in question are 64bit capable.

And this is how /proc/cpuinfo will look on an older system with only 32bit capable CPUs, there's no lm flag as you can see:

oldserver# grep flags /proc/cpuinfo
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm

That's it, hope this little tip helps you next time you're puzzled about your CPU capabilities!