LOCK_SGA=TRUE Causes An ORA-27126 During Database Startup On AIX (Doc ID 827656.1)

Symptoms

Having implemented the Fox Technologies BoKs product and environment variable LOCK_SGA=TRUE set, a 10.2.0.4 Oracle database fails to start with error
  ORA-27126: unable to lock shared memory segment in core

This problem only affects Oracle 10.2.0.4 on the AIX operating system.

Other symptoms include:

1) Previous versions of the Oracle 10.2 database did not experience this condition. Most customers so far see this issue after upgrading from 10.2.0.3.

2) The version of AIX does not seem to matter either but most customers are on either AIX 5.3 or 6.1.

3) When customers use the truss command on the sqlplus session, they see and Err#1 EPERM on the shmctl() system call.

4) So far, all customers seeing this error condition are using a 3rd party security tool called BoKs from Fox Technologies. The customer can determine if they are using this product by looking for a line in /etc/inittab similar to:

rcboks:2:wait:/etc/rc.boks > /dev/console 2>&1 # Start BoKS 6.5

It may not match this exactly, but one only needs to search /etc/inittab on the string "boks" to find it.

5) Other security tools that customers have used such as powerbroker or SeOS do not display this problem.

6) Customers have asked Oracle development what has changed in shared memory allocation between 10.2.0.3 and 10.2.0.4 and the only code changes noticed where the use of vmgetinfo() system call before the shmget() / shmctl(). According to IBM, the vmgetinfo() system call should not require any special privileges or access permissions.

Cause

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