Why does Rasbian report the Cortex-A72 CPU of the Raspberry 4 as ARMv7?

Question

I run lscpu on a Raspberry Pi 4:

Architecture:        armv7l
Byte Order:          Little Endian
CPU(s):              4
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3
Thread(s) per core:  1
Core(s) per socket:  4
Socket(s):           1
Vendor ID:           ARM
Model:               3
Model name:          Cortex-A72
Stepping:            r0p3
CPU max MHz:         1500.0000
CPU min MHz:         600.0000
BogoMIPS:            108.00
Flags:               half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm crc32

It says that it is a ARMv7 architecture, although Wikipedia says it should be a ARMv8 architecture.

What is the reason for this mismatch?

Answer 1

Have a look at this old answer.

Till the Pi goes 64bit O/S I guess it will only report v7.