Manjaro OpenRC, an alternative to systemd

OpenRC, an alternative to systemd

From Manjaro
Revision as of 17:27, 24 July 2014 by imported>Aaditya (→‎wish -> need)

OpenRC is an init system maintained by the Gentoo developers. OpenRC is a dependency based init system that works with the system provided init program, normally sysvinit. It is not a replacement for sysvinit.

It can be used as an alternative to systemd, for users that like more control over their system and do not want all the features that systemd provides and automatically activates.

Installation

OpenRC is available from the the Manjaro repositories. It can be installed as:

sudo pacman -S openrc-base

The output of the above command looks like the following:

$ sudo pacman -S openrc-base
:: There are 10 members in group openrc-base:
:: Repository community
   1) cronie-openrc  2) cryptsetup-openrc  3) dbus-openrc
   4) device-mapper-openrc  5) dhcpcd-openrc  6) glibc-openrc
   7) inetutils-openrc  8) lvm2-openrc  9) mdadm-openrc  10) openrc-core

Enter a selection (default=all): 
resolving dependencies...
looking for inter-conflicts...
:: openrc-core and systemd-sysvcompat are in conflict. Remove systemd-sysvcompat? [y/N] y

Packages (12): systemd-sysvcompat-212-3 [removal]  sysvinit-2.88-15
               cronie-openrc-20140614-1  cryptsetup-openrc-20140614-1
               dbus-openrc-20140614-1  device-mapper-openrc-20140614-1
               dhcpcd-openrc-20140614-1  glibc-openrc-20140614-1
               inetutils-openrc-20140614-1  lvm2-openrc-20140614-1
               mdadm-openrc-20140614-1  openrc-core-0.12.4-16

Total Download Size:    0.22 MiB
Total Installed Size:   1.19 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]

After installing the openrc-base package group, OpenRC should boot by default instead of systemd. Note that it will boot to a command line, as the service for a graphical display manager has not yet been installed.

On installing openrc-base, you may get messages like:

run 'rc-update add cronie default'
run 'rc-update add dhcpcd default'

Running these command(s) adds the service(s) to the specified runlevels. For example if you run:

sudo rc-update add cronie default

Then the cronie service would be added to the default runelevel and would automatically be started at boot.

Additional packages

Display Manager

To boot to a graphical display manager, install the displaymanager-openrc package, and edit the /etc/conf.d/xdm file to specify your display manager. For example, to use lightdm, change the line

DISPLAYMANAGER="xdm"

to

DISPLAYMANAGER="lightdm"

Note:

lightdm and a lightdm-greeter should be installed to use lightdm as display manager.

An alternative to lightdm that I find simpler is LXDM. However the version in the repos does not automatically start a ck-session on login; alternative lxdm-consolekit from the AUR can be used.

For more info about consolekit, have a look at the Consolekit section.

Audio (ALSA)

The alsa-utils-openrc package can be installed. After installing it, run:

sudo rc-update add alsasound default

to automatically start alsa at boot.

Network Manager

By default dhcpcd is enabled via netifrc. However if you use Wifi to connect to the internet, or need a graphical network applet, then networkmanager-openrc can be installed.

networkmanager-openrc replaces the normal networkmanager package in the repos. Also, it requires consolekit and polkit-consolekit, which replaces the normal polkit from the repos.

Consolekit

You may also need to install consolekit-openrc, which supports multi-user setups, mounting of partitions by unauthorized users, etc. See the Gentoo-Wiki for more details.

Only caveat of installing consolekit is that it requires polkit-consolekit, which conflicts with the normal polkit; so if you boot to systemd you wont be able to mount partitions if you are not in the storage group.

However using the command line, or as root user, one can mount any partition or perform most functions that are made available to the normal user via polkit. See the Arch-wiki for more details.

Consolekit also allows a normal (non-root) user to shutdown or restart the system if the desktop environment supports it.

See the Using Consolekit section on how to install and for more info.

openrc-desktop

The openrc-desktop package group can be used to install most of the above desktop related packages in one go. For example:

$ sudo pacman -S openrc-desktop
:: There are 6 members in group openrc-desktop:
:: Repository community
   1) acpid-openrc  2) alsa-utils-openrc  3) avahi-openrc  4) consolekit-openrc
   5) displaymanager-openrc  6) gpm-openrc

Enter a selection (default=all): 
resolving dependencies...
looking for inter-conflicts...

Packages (6): acpid-openrc-20140614-1  alsa-utils-openrc-20140614-1
              avahi-openrc-20140614-1  consolekit-openrc-20140614-1
              displaymanager-openrc-20140614-1  gpm-openrc-20140614-1

Total Installed Size:   0.12 MiB
Net Upgrade Size:       0.00 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] 

Others

For acpi support acpid-openrc can be installed and enabled.

To suspend and hibernate via the command line, pm-utils can be installed. You may also need the upower-pm-utils package if suspend and hibernate does not work. See the troubleshooting for some issues you may face.

Configuration

Adding or Removing services

Services can be added to startup with:

sudo rc-update add <service> default 

A service can be removed from startup with:

sudo rc-update del <service> default

Check running services

To check what services are running, one can type:

rc-status

Start / stop / restart services

To start / stop / restart services immediately, the rc-service command can be used. For example:

sudo rc-service networkmanager restart

Using Consolekit

Additionally, if not already done, consolekit can be installed to perform root actions like shutting down or restarting system as non-root user from your Desktop Environment.

Consolekit can be installed in the following way:

sudo pacman -S consolekit-openrc

The output looks like the following:

$ sudo pacman -S consolekit-openrc
[sudo] password for aaditya: 
resolving dependencies...
looking for inter-conflicts...
:: polkit-consolekit and polkit are in conflict. Remove polkit? [y/N] y

Packages (5): consolekit-0.4.6-4  js185-1.0.0-2  polkit-0.112-2 [removal]
              polkit-consolekit-0.112-2  consolekit-openrc-20140614-1

Total Download Size:    1.90 MiB
Total Installed Size:   10.67 MiB
Net Upgrade Size:       9.08 MiB 

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] 

To check that consolekit is running and a ck-session was started, the following command can be used:

ck-list-sessions

The output looks like the following:

Session1:
	unix-user = '1000'
	realname = 'Aaditya Bagga'
	seat = 'Seat1'
	session-type = 
	active = TRUE
	x11-display = ':0'
	x11-display-device = '/dev/tty7'
	display-device = 
	remote-host-name = 
	is-local = TRUE
	on-since = '2014-06-15T13:29:58.652929Z'
	login-session-id = 

If you are not getting similar output, then maybe a ck-session is not being started by your display manager.

Some gotcha's

Dsplay managers that are known to work with consolekit are lightdm, lxdm (via lxdm-consolekit), and kdm (via kdebase-workspace-consolekit). Have a look at the Display Manager section for more info.

If you start a graphical session from the command line, this forum post may be of some help.

If you use Openbox or another Window Manager along with oblogout, then oblogout-consolekit from the AUR can be used for having a graphical logout interface.

Replacing systemd with eudev (advanced users)

With OpenRC being used as init system, the role of systemd is reduced to that of a udev provider, and for compatibility reasons.

eudev, developed by the Gentoo folks, can be used as replacement. Note that removing systemd could cause incompatibilities with existing software, hence its advertised as being for advanced / minimalistic users.

Step 1) Install eudev-openrc

sudo pacman -S eudev-openrc

The output looks like the following:

$ sudo pacman -S eudev-openrc
resolving dependencies...
looking for inter-conflicts...
:: libsystemd-eudevcompat and libsystemd are in conflict. Remove libsystemd? [y/N] y
:: eudev and systemd are in conflict. Remove systemd? [y/N] y

Packages (6): eudev-1.8-2  libeudev-1.8-2  libsystemd-214-2 [removal]
             libsystemd-eudevcompat-214-2  systemd-214-2 [removal]
             eudev-openrc-20140621-1

Total Download Size:    0.85 MiB
Total Installed Size:   6.88 MiB
Net Upgrade Size:       -12.77 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]

After the above steps systemd would be uninstalled and replaced by eudev and its counterparts.

Note the optional dependencies for eudev:

Optional dependencies for eudev
   upower-pm-utils: pm-utils support

The upower-pm-utils package can be installed in order to be able to suspend and hibernate the system.

Possible issues

After uninstalling systemd, I could not login to my xfce4-session, as it was complied for systemd. Hence I had to install xfce4-session-consolekit from the AUR to get it working.

I also had to downgrade xfce4-power-manager to version 1.2.0-5 (or less) to get it working.

I had to rebuild gvfs as my unmounted partitions were not being displayed.

Troubleshooting

Boot warnings/errors

When booting, you may get errors like:

tmpfiles: ignoring invalid entry on line 32 of `/usr/lib/tmpfiles.d//legacy.conf'
tmpfiles: ignoring invalid entry on line 33 of `/usr/lib/tmpfiles.d//legacy.conf'
tmpfiles: ignoring invalid entry on line 34 of `/usr/lib/tmpfiles.d//legacy.conf'
tmpfiles: ignoring invalid entry on line 11 of `/usr/lib/tmpfiles.d//systemd-nologin.conf'
tmpfiles: ignoring invalid entry on line 18 of `/usr/lib/tmpfiles.d//x11.conf'

To correct, I removed the lines referenced in the above files. These errors have been fixed by the developers on github, and should be available in the next release.



Tip
The boot logs for OpenRC are stored in /var/log/rc.log

Enable Swap (for GPT partitions)

If you were using systemd on a GPT partitioned hard disk, then you may need to enable swap via /etc/fstab. This is so because systemd handled swap automatically on GPT partitions, and gave error if it was mounted via fstab.

I added the following entry to my /etc/fstab

# /dev/sda10
UUID=0c3e9434-bc5c-461c-a5e4-4e9fe5f9a149	swap	swap	sw	0	0

Using tmpfs

systemd used to set a tmpfs by default; to set it manually via /etc/fstab, I added the following lines:

tmpfs		/tmp		tmpfs   nodev,nosuid          	0  	0

See the Arch Wiki for more details.

Module auto-loading

For OpenRC, the modules to be loaded at boot are specified in /etc/conf.d/modules rather than being present as individual files in /etc/modules-load.d

The required modules can be manually moved over. An example /etc/conf.d/modules file looks like the following:

# You should consult your kernel documentation and configuration
# for a list of modules and their options.

modules="vboxdrv"

Setting hostname

If your hostname is being displayed as localhost even if there a different hostname in /etc/hostname, then you probably need to change your hostname in /etc/conf.d/hostname

Further Reading

The Arch Wiki

OpenRC on Arch Linux

Using OpenRC on Arch / Archbang / Manjaro Linux

Support

Following is a link to this page's forum counterpart where you can post any related feedback: [1]

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