Neil Horman wrote:
> The values in /proc/sys/kernel/ that begin with shm defined the
> boundaries of what you can allocate in term of shared memory.

Then no. Nothing visible has changed. 

  $ ls -l /proc/sys/kernel/shm*
  -rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Sep 20 10:16 /proc/sys/kernel/shmall
  -rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Sep 20 10:16 /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax
  -rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Sep 20 10:16 /proc/sys/kernel/shmmni

  $ cat /proc/sys/kernel/shm*
  2097152
  33554432
  4096


Same values with 2.6.9-rc1-mm5. 

This is dmesg when I start the vmware service:
  /dev/vmmon: Module vmmon: registered with major=10 minor=165
  /dev/vmmon: Module vmmon: initialized
  /dev/vmnet: open called by PID 1443 (vmnet-bridge)
  /dev/vmnet: hub 0 does not exist, allocating memory.
  /dev/vmnet: port on hub 0 successfully opened
  bridge-eth0: enabling the bridge
  bridge-eth0: up
  bridge-eth0: already up
  bridge-eth0: attached
  /dev/vmnet: open called by PID 1459 (vmnet-natd)
  /dev/vmnet: hub 8 does not exist, allocating memory.
  /dev/vmnet: port on hub 8 successfully opened

After I start vmware:
  /dev/vmnet: open called by PID 1475 (vmnet-netifup)
  /dev/vmnet: port on hub 8 successfully opened
  /dev/vmnet: open called by PID 1496 (vmnet-dhcpd)
  /dev/vmnet: port on hub 8 successfully opened

And the message that vmware shows in a dialog box:
  Could not mmap 139264 bytes of memory from file offset 0 at
  (nil): Operation not permitted.
  Failed to allocate shared memory.


I guess I'll have to go back to 2.6.9-rc1-mm5 :(
I'm attaching my .config and full dmesg in case anyone has any idea of what's 
going on.

Thanks Neil and Felipe,

Norberto