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My system is mostly PIC based. Could this be the cause of the virtual memory becoming "confused" in this way during compilation of the kernel modules?

I also wonder if this is instead a "make" bug.
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So, I get the infamous "make error: *** Virtual Memory Exhausted".
given that I am sitting on a uClibc system that is using only 40megs of RAM, and then type make modules_install. The error appears.

Idea in mind, I switch over to the glibc system, which uses 80megs under identical situations. make modules_install. Success, no virtual memory error.

This seemed interesting. I grabbed the 2.6.13.X kernel, and had the same results on both systems.

Now the glibc system had the 2.6.11.12 kernel running. So this time, I grabbed that source, and moved it onto the uClibc system. Typed make modules_install and success.

At some point in the kernel, between 2.6.11.12 and 2.6.14, the memory management got screwed up in such a way that my uClibc claims there is no virtual memory left, when I have 400+megs of RAM sitting around with nothing to do.

Looking further, I achieved identical results with swap enabled, and disabled. And the swap partition is one gigabyte, for reasons of sleep mode.

Any ideas? Hints on getting around this? (i cannot keep using the glibc system as i've depreciated it) Is there anyting I may have missed that could result in this situation?

memtest86+ fails to find any memory problems over extensive tests.
This also assumes that you assume I did all of the make menuconfig, make make install, etc.. commands prior to make modules_install, in every case