Random freeze in Opensuse 11.1

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

After some searching, I found this thread that seems very similar to my issue:
SuSE 11.1 freezes after some seconds - openSUSE Forums

The difference is that I can SSH into my machine and, for instance, successfully execute telinit to reboot or just restart X (telinit 3; telinit 5). I am completely unsure as to what might be causing this issue. Some potentially relevant information:

  1. When the freeze happens, it appears that it is only the X interface that freezes. No keyboard commands work, and mouse clicks do nothing, but programs already running continue to run unabated (e.g. a flash video in a browser window, or top in a terminal window).
  2. By running top in anticipation of a freeze, I was able to get an idea of what processes were running at the time of the freeze. Unfortunately it didn’t show much: first top seemed to freeze for a few seconds, after which it continued to operate as normal, but didn’t show any processes as using more than 1% of the CPU.
  3. All freezes happen under light load, appear to be highly random and unrelated to anything specific I am doing at the time.
  4. I am able to press the power button to bring up the shutdown menu to perform a clean shutdown (I can’t actually interact with the shutdown menu, but once it pops up, it shuts down one minute later). No other buttons that I have tried seem to do anything after the freeze has occurred.
  5. My system is OpenSUSE 11.1 running Gnome with all updates installed.

Any ideas for a way to diagnose this issue and, hopefully, fix it?

#2

Sorry, I posted the wrong thread. This is the correct one that has a similar issue to my own:
11.1 systems locking up? - openSUSE Forums

#3

If you have the latest kernel update 2.6.27.19-3.2 and it’s still giving trouble, then issue in the thread you mentioned above is not the problem. That problem has been fixed with the release of a kernel update. It was quite deadly and freezes everything, you can’t even ssh in, but you can still ping. And it only affects people running Samba or dovecot or using any software that uses the inotify system call.