Recently I want to give Common Lisp a try. After reading this great Common Lisp Implementation Survey, I decided to go first with SBCL. After installing the binary package of SBCL-1.0.45 on my openSUSE-11.1 x86-64bit with 8Giga memory, I ran into this annoying error message when I started SBCL in terminal:

mmap: Cannot allocate memory ensure_space: failed to validate 8589869056 bytes at 0x1000000000 (hint: Try "ulimit -a"; maybe you should increase memory limits.)

I researched online for a while and finally I came up a solution(it worked for me at least). Solution: start sbcl like this

sbcl --dynamic-space-size 2028 --core /local/vol00/software/lib/sbcl/sbcl.core

I guess the reason to fail is that by default sbcl will allocate 8Giga MB memory on x86-64 bit platform, which is not permitted due to the physical memory limitation. So use --dynamic-space-size to change the setting, also use --core option if your sbcl installation is not in the default location.