SHMMAX is the maximum size of a single shared memory segment set in “bytes”.
SHMALL As SHMALL is the total size of Shard Memory Segments System wide,it should always be less than the Physical Memory on the System and should be greater than sum of SGA’s of all the oracle databases on the server.
/proc/sys/kernel/shmmax /etc/sysctl.conf
I got the ORA-27102 error upon instance startup:
SQL> startup
ORA-27102: out of memory
Linux-x86_64 Error: 28: No space left on device
The solution was to increase kernel.shmall from 2097152 (as it is in the install doc for oracle 10h and oracle 11g) to 4194304. Probably is better to leave the RHEL5 default which is 4294967296