My Debian box started throwing up 

allocation failed: out of vmalloc space – use vmalloc=<size> to increase size

errors.

cat /proc/meminfo showed

VmallocTotal: 114680 kB
VmallocUsed: 113940 kB
VmallocChunk: 316 kB

In order to fix it I edited

/boot/grub/menu.lst

and added the vmalloc variable, before

kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686 root=/dev/md0 ro quiet

after

kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686 root=/dev/md0 ro quiet vmalloc=256m

(the default is 128m) reboot

cat /proc/cpuinfo

VmallocTotal:   245752 kB
VmallocUsed:     10884 kB
VmallocChunk:   234440 kB