Darwin kernel architecture and OS X, 64bit on 32bit kernel, how does this work?

Posted by overscore on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by overscore
Published on 2012-03-30T22:45:02Z Indexed on 2012/03/31 5:28 UTC
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The OS X Lion (10.7) OS runs on mostly 64-bit binaries as reported by Activity Monitor. Given this, and the fact that my laptop runs a 32-bit version of the EFI and thus also a 32-bit kernel, how does the arch mixing work in general?

Darwin Kernel Version 11.3.0: Thu Jan 12 18:48:32 PST 2012; root:xnu-1699.24.23~1/RELEASE_I386

Normally one would run 32b binaries on x86_64, but the other way around would require pushing the cpu into 64b mode, which AFAIK cannot be undone.

Hope this question is clear enough..

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