Yes, I didn't notice any disk activity beyond the normal.

(On an older computer I had serious problems develop related to the hard drive DMA, so I'm fairly sensitive to this.)

Wow, I had not noticed how large those were. (I forgot it was in kB not in B.) For comparison, what is yours at -- now or typically? I have no basis for comparison.

What I had hoped for was less disk activity, because enlarging virtual memory should influence the paging related decisions by the OS.

About the 32TiB. These values may well be normal. At the moment I only have access to a 32-bit OS with these values:

VmallocTotal:   770040 kB
VmallocUsed:      4288 kB
VmallocChunk:   765520 kB.

It has been a long time, but I recall Linux sometimes ships with a number of kernel images and some can be huge. The reason for this is, of course, that some Linux distributions want to have a kernel image that has all possible device drivers built into the kernel so installation into new hardware is easy (all devices are recognized, including all/most graphic cards, network cards, host adapters, etc).

Then, of course, after making some notes on the required devices after an initial boot, a new kernel should be rebuilt and that kernel is much, much smaller.

I've not been following this thread very closely, but perhaps the kernel was not built compactly for the specific hardware and is simply too huge, supporting many necessary devices? Did you build a custom kernel or use a huge default one?

For example, our current running kernal is:

$ du -h vmlinuz-2.6.31-15-server
3.8M    vmlinuz-2.6.31-15-server

I just check some other 64-bit systems, and it looks like it is normal.

The default Ubuntu 9.10 one:

:~$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.31-17-generic (buildd@crested) (gcc version 4.4.1 (Ubuntu 4.4.1-4ubuntu8) ) #54-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 10 17:01:44 UTC 2009