"David T. Lewis" <lewis at mail.msen.com> writes:
 
> This is how your Squeak VM will behave if it it is hung up in an IO
> operation. For example, if a primitive is called in such a way that
> it blocks on a read that is never satisfied, you will see exactly the
> symptoms you describe. You are on Linux, so you may be able to break
> it loose outside of Squeak by looking at the open file descriptors
> in /proc/1234/fd/* (replace 1234 with the pid of your Squeak process).
> Otherwise you are hosed.

That was a real good hint. 

Eventually I had forgotten that there is life outside of
squeak. /proc/fd did not reveal anything but strace showed that
squeaks loops around /floppy which is a symlink to a directory that is
managed by the automounter. Somehow squeak and the automounter seem to
have gotten into some sort of race condition (there was no floppy in
the drive).

Stopping the automounter "solved" this problem.