ORA-27102: out of memory - cannot start RAC node

Question

I have a test 2 node RAC system 10.2.0.4 RHEL5 64 bit. 32 GB RAM on each node, nothing else running on these servers. I was playing around with different parameter settings, specifically setting up ASMM and I upped my SGA_TARGET and SGA_MAX_SIZE and changed the STATISTICS_LEVEL=typical. I previously had SGA_TARGET and SGA_MAX set to 1536M and upped it to 8GB on the first node (only):
alter system set SGA_MAX_SIZE=8G scope=spfile SID='NODE1';
alter system set SGA_TARGET=8G scope=spfile SID='NODE1';After trying to restart the first node via SRVCTL (it didn't, simply saying that the node couldn't start), and attempting to restart the node stand-alone connected via sqlplus as sys, I get the following errors:
SQL> startup nomount
ORA-27102: out of memory
Linux-x86_64 Error: 28: No space left on deviceThe alert log just has the following:
Starting ORACLE instance (normal)
Mon Mar  8 17:03:52 2010
Starting ORACLE instance (normal)And there aren't really any relevant trace files. Top looks fine, memory isn't over-allocated.
I'm sure this has something to do with shmmax and my other kernel settings which I stupidly forgot to check and read up on before upping the SGA_TARGET. At this point, I just want to go back to my original settings of 1536 M - but since I'm not able to start the instance even in nomount, and am using SPFILE and not pfiles, I'm not sure how to do that. Any help is appreciated. This is a test system and I have no automated backups going at the present time.

Answer 1

You're most likely correct - I have been running without issue with the existing kernel params and SGA set to 1536M - but at this point, I just want to get back to my original settings to start the first node, then do additional research on the kernel params and SGA settings. So, any help in setting the SGA back to what I had previously would be most appreciated.
Here are my kernel params:
kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65500
net.core.rmem_default = 1048576
net.core.rmem_max = 4194304
net.core.wmem_default = 262144
net.core.wmem_max =1048536