with “s” I end up in rescue mode.
in dmesg last message is EXT4-fs … mounted filesystem…
Any ideas what to look for here?
with “3” I end with the last line “Link is down” as above, system completely frozen as above…
It sounds like the problem with ethernet driver. Can you boot working kernel and post output of
lspci -nnk
Its a Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 with kernel driver / module r8169
More info needed? 
Try booting with
module_blacklist=r8169
on kernel command line.
boots just fine… sigh
for sure no networking, which is suboptimal for a headless box…
Of course not. This was just to confirm that the problem is in this driver. At this point you should open a bug on https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/, mention that it is regression and provide the same information (that blacklisting this module is enough to boot). Hopefully kernel developers will suggest some ways to obtain more information.
my last bug report ended nowhere. was just a waiste of time… 
Hm. I’m sorry that the people that are volunteering their time to produce openSUSE didn’t respond to your bug report as quickly as you think they should.
What is this bug report that just got ignored? I’m quite curious.
That looks like a bug that got quite a bit of engagement, and it’s entirely possible that the folks that responded either don’t have the same hardware you do, to test against, or they got busy, or they got sick, or who knows what.
This is how opensource is sometimes. I can guarantee you, that if you don’t file bug reports, that there’s zero chance your issue is ever going to be dealt with, except perhaps by happy accident, when upstream tweaks something, and it just magically starts working again.
None of us have all the hardware or all the time to dedicate to reproducing and solving end user issues, we do the best we can.
It was suggested that you file the bug upstream with the nouveau developers, because it very well might get more eyes on it, as it is a larger group of developers, and a better chance of somebody perhaps having your same hardware.
The discussion over at the bug report was with basically the same people as in the forum here.
And at nouveau the blame game starts all over again. What’s your point?