Diagnosing Bitness: DUMPBIN and EXEHDR
Just want to know if KRNL386.EXE is 32 bit, just like VMM32.EXE. Or it is like the rest, 16 bit?
Alan Cheng
Ah—how do you tell what bitness you are? Dr. GUI knows how to diagnose this problem. But, first: KRNL386.EXE is a 16-bit program. The Windows 95 operating system is implemented as a collection of 32-bit components and 16-bit components. These components interact with each other via the flat thunk mechanism. KRNL386.EXE is the 16-bit component of Kernel and KERNEL32.DLL is the 32-bit component of Kernel. Similarly, you have:
• GDI.EXE (16 bit) / GDI32.DLL (32 bit) and
• USER.EXE (16 bit) / USER32.DLL (32 bit)
You can easily tell the bitness of each of these files by running EXEHDR or DUMPBIN on them. If DUMPBIN recognizes a file, it is 32 bit. If EXEHDR does, it is 16 bit.