Linux 64bit – How to Know if CPU Supports 64bit Operating Systems Under Linux

Look in /proc/cpuinfo. If you have the aes flag then your CPU has AES support.

You can use this command:

grep aes /proc/cpuinfo

If you have some output, which will be like

flags : a bunch of flags aes another bunch of flags

, then you have AES.

Both VMware and VirtualBox can run a 64-bit virtual machine on a 32-bit host system, if you have a 64-bit processor. For VirtualBox, your processor must have hardware virtualization support (either AMD-V or VT-x, shown as svm and vmx in the flags: line of /proc/cpuinfo under Linux); most x86-64 processors except for the earlier ones, and in particular I think all core i5 models, have this support.

Failing that, you can use a virtual machine technology that emulates an x86-64 processor in software, such as Qemu. But it's not a good idea if you don't need it: it's slow, memory-hungry, and awkward.

My recommendation is to just get a 64-bit host or at least a 64-bit kernel. You can run 32-bit applications on an x86-64 (a.k.a. amd64) kernel, in fact you can run a wholly 32-bit Linux userland on an amd64 Linux kernel.

Ubuntu doesn't provide a 64-bit kernel in its i386 distribution (Debian does). You can grab the kernel from the amd64 distribution, and applications should just run, but under natty the package isn't easily installable.

So the easiest route to running 64-bit applications would be make a parallel installation of an amd64 Ubuntu. Install it on a separate partition, keeping your existing 32-bit installation as well. In the 64-bit system, mount the existing partitions, then set up a 32-bit schroot (see this guide)) to run 32-bit programs.