Removing the udev-settle service to reduce boot times on Alpine Linux

it's marked as deprecated on other distros anyway?

• Updated 2025-05-05

On boot, waiting for udev events to process takes a default 1 minute timeout, and never finishes successfully. It has in the past, but only a couple times that I can remember. Is that from leaving on my machine for days or weeks between reboots and doing a lot of apk update/upgrades including kernel updates? I don't know, but seeing as how it never finishes and slows my boot time from several seconds (post grub, may remove that eventually too) to over a minute, it doesn't seem useful to begin with.

This turns out to be from the udev-settle service in the sysinit runlevel, and from what I could find through web searches, at least for systemd where udev-settle comes from (but isolated via eudev on Alpine Linux), it is deprecated and should not be used anyway. If you use LVM then it may be needed, but I don't use LVM on this PC.

The udev-init-scripts and udev-init-scripts-openrc packages are used and needed for openrc and eudev, and otherwise the setup-devd udev command from the alpine-conf package works and runs fine, no issues (I don't have alpine-conf installed as it's not in /etc/apk/world so it must be part of the default setup-* scripts?), but I don't seem to need udev-settle specifically.

The only thing that's happened is that setting the console font fails on boot now, from setfont(); the default font still works, and setting the font again later in the boot process works fine the 2nd time it is ran, so I don't mind this error. The faster boot more than makes up for an initially unsuccessful but later successful tty font change.

NOTE: If you need to fix or undo these changes, you can run:

doas apk fix udev-init-scripts
doas apk fix udev-init-scripts-openrc
setup-devd udev

To remove udev-settle and remove it from running:

# Remove udev-settle from all runlevels
doas rc-update del udev-settle -a

# Remove script from running on init (ran on startup/boot time?)
doas rm /etc/init.d/udev-settle

If you want to reduce the timeout, but not remove outright, uncomment the #udev_settle_timeout=120 line in /etc/conf.d/udev-settle, and change the number.