Memory usage for MySQL

[Thaddeus Quintin]

I'm working on a FreeBSD 6.1 machine and setting up MySQL 5.0 with  
some InnoDB tables.

The machine has 2GB of RAM and will primarily be used as a database  
machine and will also be serving files over NFS (not high volume).

The issue that I'm having is that when I start up MySQL I get a  
couple "Out of Memory" errors before it actually starts up.  Looks  
like this-

060719 11:55:35  InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 0 43656
/usr/local/libexec/mysqld: Out of memory (Needed 950109184 bytes)
/usr/local/libexec/mysqld: Out of memory (Needed 712581120 bytes)
060719 11:55:35 [Note] /usr/local/libexec/mysqld: ready for connections.
Version: '5.0.22-log'  socket: '/tmp/mysql.sock'  port: 3306

If I reduce or increase the innodb_buffer_pool_size variable for  
MySQL I can eliminate or increase the number of errors.  This set of  
errors was with innodb_buffer_pool_size set to 600M

This is what top currently shows for MySQL-
   PID USERNAME  THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME   WCPU  
COMMAND
   871 mysql       8  20    0  1196M   159M kserel 0   0:01  0.00%  
mysqld

I tweaked /boot/loader.conf to allow larger data size for processes  
already (rebooted after changes)-
kern.maxdsiz="1395864371" # 1.3GB
kern.dfldsiz="1395864371" # 1.3GB
kern.maxssiz="134217728" # 128MB

If there's an out of memory error, how come MySQL starts up?  Is this  
something to be concerned about?  What else should I be checking to  
figure this out?

Thanks-
Thaddeus