I considered this important enough to warrant a bug report. The forum thread
where I discovered and further explained the issue can be found here:

https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/527821-Blender-crashes-at-startup-with-LLVM-error

When running the command 'zypper dup' without additional parameters, zypper
wants to install the OpenCL ICD named pocl. However Mesa already uses another
ICD which seems to come in the package libOpenCL1. This is a problem because
from the looks of it, you may only have one ICD installed on your system at
once; More than that will cause a conflict, and every OpenCL application will
crash with the following error:

mesa: CommandLine Error: Option 'enable-value-profiling' registered more than
once!
LLVM ERROR: inconsistency in registered CommandLine options

To test and confirm this, you can install both "libOpenCL1" and "pocl"
simultaneously then attempt to run Blender 3D: The application should crash on
startup with the console output quoted above. After removing the pocl package
however, Blender will start and work properly again.

Until this bug is solved by the X11 developers, it might be a good idea for the
openSUSE repositories to be aware of it and mark multiple OpenCL ICD packages
as incompatible, only recommending that you install one at once. Users may find
that OpenCL applications have suddenly stopped working, and not know what to do
in order to fix the problem. A workaround for the time being is to mark pocl as
"taboo / never install".