Hi,
Just increasing the SHMMAX parameter as such should not mean anything, untill some application tries to use a large shared memory segment.
SHMMAX will only define what is the contiguous maximum memory segment that can be allocated to an application. Thus say even if you have SHMMAX as a lesser value and your application requests higher shared memory segment, then there will be multiple shared memory segments that will be allocated to the application (provided there is enough virtual memory - memory+swap - available).
Thus I believe that the application request of shared memory is more important than just the parameter.
In short, if your Oracle DB is not asking for more shared memory, then just increase or decrease of SHMMAX should not affect the server operations. i.e. If your DB does not demand for more SGA/PGA, then I do not see why changing SHMMAX should affect anything - like reboot of server.
Are any other applications running other than Oracle DB ?
How much SGA/PGA is being used by the Oracle DB ? - ipcs -mb
Are you starting multiple instances of DB ?
Does the reboot happen when you start some application/DB ?
Are there any core files generated ?
Regards,
Ninad