Hello
1) How can I find what bit of OS I am running on? 16 bit, 64 bit?
2) What is the difference in having different bits?
3) Below is the output of /etc/release/ what are all these components meaning?
$ more /etc/release
Solaris 10 11/06 s10x_u3wos_10 X86
$
Solaris 10 Means the OS is Solaris 10 (aka SunOS 5.10)
11/06 Means that this is the specific release of Solaris 10 made in November 2006 (different releases have different bug fixes and features - it's sort of like Windows Service packs... sort of)
s10x_u3wos_10 - Sorry, no idea
X86 This version is compiled for X86 processors (ie the same sort of hardware you can run windows on, as opposed to something like a Sparc architecture).
On Solaris you can find out the supported programming model(s) using isainfo.
isainfo -v
There are a number of other options including the -b option prints the number of bits in the address space of the native applications environment.
On current UNIX systems the programing model is typically either IPL32 or LP64. In the mid-1990s, the Aspen WG agreed on the LP64 programming model and produced a paper which will help you understand the various programming models.