This is more a FYI than a question and posted here as a generic location.
Without going into too much detail, my Compaq 1000 MSI MS-7184 system was never stable on 12.1 and became worse as time and upgrades continued. It should be noted that the hardware/firmware seems unusual. In fact, most PCIe video cards will not work in it.
None the less, three weeks ago, with a recent ‘zypper up’, the system would lock up after running for a while. Memory intensive operations would lock up faster. After many boots on GNU system rescue to read /var/log/messages and other log files created with boot options, I determined that it was a vmalloc() error.
Since I use a custom kernel on my LAN server, I copied it over as a tar file: cd /usr/src; tar cvzf linux-3.4.9-WMM.tar./gz linux-3.4.9-WMM.default, extracted it locally and did a 'make modules_install; make install; ldconfig; SuSEconfig.
Problem solved. I am obviously using or not using options that the default kernel does/does not.
With 12.2 out, this may be moot. None the less, for those interested, I can send you my .config file.
The kernel is 3.4.9 as downloaded from kernel.org, set up as a 32bit kernel, non PAE.