This was really bugging me, so I hacked out the test case for the attach failure. Hoses 2.6.29.1 100% every time. Run it like this: tcbm_att tcbm_att - tcbm_att - tcbm_att - It will break on the last iteration with ENOMEM and ENOMEM is all any shmget() or shmat() call gets forever more. After removing the segments this appears: HugePages_Total: 2048 HugePages_Free: 2048 HugePages_Rsvd: 1280 HugePages_Surp: 0 Even though no segments show in 'ipcs'.