Firstly, I'll describe the problem I'm having. I compiled FlightGear from source on openSUSE 15.0 Linux running on old Intel Core2 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti. Prior to the 2018 series, I never had a problem with running FlightGear on this hardware. My problem now is that on starting FG, it will sometimes freeze at the point of "Loading Scenery". This freezes are random and I can sometimes get past that point and actually fly something. However, it might freeze again at some later random point. I have noticed that the computer is in a interminable loop writing/reading something from the disk when this happens. This is the cause of the problem.
I normally launch FG will the "cpulimit" utility so that it is automatically killed if it uses up to much CPU. This sometimes happens, but rarely. So I suspected that the scenery was the issue. I originally used the version 1.0 scenery, but FG keeps replacing it with the the HD version irrespective of whether I use the "--disable-terrasync" option either via command line or through the launcher. I don't want it to update the scenery automatically. Clearly, FG does not respect the "--disable-terrasync" flag. My guess is that it tries to sync the scenery whenever I launch it.
So I need something to stop it from the read/write loop or messing with my scenery files. I suspect I need to patch on the source code to simply nullify terrasync. Any hints please?