ptrcnull.me/content/posts/openrc-async-services.md

---
title: "OpenRC: Start services after login prompt"
date: 2021-11-17T21:14:15+01:00
draft: false
---

I'm using Alpine Linux as my main OS on desktop.
As I don't use any display manager/greeter such as LightDM's,
I noticed that it takes quite a bit of time to actually get the login prompt.
After a while of searching through logs,
I realized that some services - primarily `chronyd` - wait
a few seconds for e.g. getting a response from NTP server
and don't exit the start function immediately after starting the process.
I tried googling for a solution and found [this](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/579014)
Unix StackExchange answer, yet it didn't solve my problem.

_But_, after reading Alpine User Handbook's page on
[OpenRC](https://docs.alpinelinux.org/user-handbook/0.1a/Working/openrc.html),
I got the idea that it could be solved with a bit of tinkering with custom runlevels.

So, the final solution was:

- create a custom runlevel (I chose the name "async", but it doesn't matter)

```console
$ doas mkdir /etc/runlevels/async
```

- add `default` as a [stacked runlevel](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC/Stacked_runlevel)

```console
$ doas rc-update add -s default async
```

- remove services from `default` and add them to `async`

```console
$ doas rc-update del chronyd
$ doas rc-update add chronyd async
```

- add changing runlevel to `async` to `inittab`

Add this line to `/etc/inittab`:

```text
::once:/sbin/openrc async
```

After rebooting, services from `default` runlevel will still block agetty
from running (after all, it has the `wait` label in inittab), but services
from `async` will start separately.