As mentioned above by someone else, what they mean by "x86” is something of a hybrid. The kernel/ring 0 code is certainly 64 bit, and I suspect they may be usin

As mentioned above by someone else, what they mean by "x86” is something of a hybrid. The kernel/ring 0 code is certainly 64 bit, and I suspect they may be using 64 bit long mode everywhere, but they're making special accomodations to the many VMS programs that assume 32 bit pointers. This isn't relevant just to VAX code -- because previous versions of VMS made these same accomodations, some programs simply never changed, up to Itanium, despite both alpha and Itanium being 64 bit (and only 64 bit, alpha didn't and I don't think Itanium had "true" 32 bit modes) So "x86” is really referring more to the platform than the specific CPU or mode here, since it'll be a pretty seamless mixture of both.