ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system

Problem Description

While creating a startup database
ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system
from where you can ignore the error message.
The similar scenario also occur whenever you try to start your database then startup shows error message like below.

SQL> STARTUP
ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system


Cause of the Problem

•Starting from Oracle 11g the automatic memory management feature is now defined with parameter MEMORY_TARGET and MEMMORY_MAX_TARGET.

•On linux file system the shared memory need to be mounted on /dev/shm directory on the operating system.

•And the size of /dev/shm needs to be greater than MEMORY_TARGET or MEMMORY_MAX_TARGET.

•The AMM (Automatic Memory Management) now in 11g manages both SGA and PGA together by MMAN process.

•The MEMORY_TARGET parameter in 11g comes for (SGA_TARGET+PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET) which was in 10g.

•And MEMORY_MAX_TARGET parameter in 11g comes instead of SGA_MAX_TARGET parameter which was in 10g.

•The ORA-00845:can arises for the following two reasons on linux system.

1)If the shared memory which is mapped to /dev/shm directory is less than the size of MEMORY_TARGET or MEMORY_MAX_TARGET.
or,
2)If the shared memory is not mapped to /dev/shm directory.


Solution of the Problem

Option #1

Make sure /dev/shm is properly mounted. You can see it by,
#df -h or #df -k command.
The output should be similar like

$ df -k
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
...
shmfs 1G 512M 512M 50% /dev/shm


We see here for /dev/shm we have assigned 1G memory. Now if you set MEMORY_TARGET more than 1G then above ORA-845 will arise. For example if you have MEMORY_TARGET or MEMORY_MAX_TARGET set to 12G then you can mount shared memory to 13g like below.
As a root user,
# mount -t tmpfs shmfs -o size=13g /dev/shm
In order to make the settings persistence so that it will affect after restarting machine add an entry in /etc/fstab similar to the following:

shmfs /dev/shm tmpfs size=13g 0


Option #2

step 1: startup database nomount;
step 2: create pfile from spfile
step 3: open the pfile and remove MEMORY_TARGET parameter
step 4: startup database with modified pfile

cheer........