After much STFW'ing, RTFM'ing and experimenting I finally got Oracle 10g to start a database on a SunBlade 100 with 512MB of memory and Solaris 10. As most of the replies on the web about error 27102 "out of memory" address solutions in Solaris 8 and 9, I thought I should post a clear description of the solution here.
Unlike earlier releases of Solaris, most of the system parameters needed to run Oracle are already set properly, so the only one you need is the maximum shared memory parameter. In earlier versions this was called SHMMAX and was set by editing the /etc/system file and rebooting. With Solaris 10 you set this by modifying a "Resource Control Value". You can do this temporarily by using prctl, but that is lost at reboot so you will need to add the command to the oracle user's .profile. The other option is to create a default project for the oracle user:
projadd -U oracle -K "project.max-shm-memory=(priv,2048MB,deny)" user.oracle
what this does:
- makes a project named "user.oracle" with the user oracle as it's only member.
- because the name was of the form "user.username" it becomes the oracle user's default project.
- the value of the maximum shared memory is set to 2gb, you might want to use a larger value here if you have more memory and swap.
- no reboot is needed, the user will get the new value at their next login.