[TriLUG] 536 GB of allocated virtual memory

[Mike Seda]

Hi All,
We have a Dell PowerEdge system with dual AMD Opterons and 8 GB RAM, 
which is running RHEL 4 WS. The problem is that the system thinks that 
there is 536 GB of allocated virtual memory. Kernel 2.6.9-42.ELsmp 
(64-bit version) is currently installed. The same behavior was observed 
when running kernel 2.6.9-5.ELsmp (64-bit version). Can someone provide 
an explanation for this phenomenon? Output from `cat /proc/meminfo` is 
provided below:
MemTotal:      8045168 kB
MemFree:       6155328 kB
Buffers:          1232 kB
Cached:          19816 kB
SwapCached:     413472 kB
Active:         726700 kB
Inactive:      1113940 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:      8045168 kB
LowFree:       6155328 kB
SwapTotal:     2031608 kB
SwapFree:      1453720 kB
Dirty:              24 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:        1417236 kB
Slab:            20108 kB
CommitLimit:   6054192 kB
Committed_AS:  1818920 kB
PageTables:       8420 kB
VmallocTotal: 536870911 kB
VmallocUsed:      2004 kB
VmallocChunk: 536868779 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
Hugepagesize:     2048 kB

Thx,
Mike