mdconfig -t malloc limits

[Kevin Downey]

I am building a shiny new desktop, the only thing I don't have right
now is the hard drive, so
I have been booting a minimal system off a flash drive. The box has
two gigs of ram. if I try to create a malloc backed md device bigger
then 300mb(this is not the exact limit but it is between 300mb and
400mb) it fails. If I use -o reserve the mdconfig command fails and if
I don't then when I try and use that space FreeBSD crashes. It seems
like there should be enough unused memory to create a 1gb malloc
backed md.

I have no swap because the only drive is a flash drive.
/ is  mounted read only.
/tmp and /var are 124mb malloc backed md devices

What is the deal? Is this some tunable limit? Should I fire up memtest?

FreeBSD mona.nexus.lan 6.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE #0: Fri Jan 12
11:05:30 UTC 2007
root at dessler.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SMP  i386
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