asusctl (ROG laptops) without systemd

[psycho]

I realise the developer of asusctl is uninterested in supporting anything except systemd, however I find it hard to believe that systemd is really necessary to control these modern ASUS ROG laptops: I'm hopeful that whatever asusctl is doing can be done by other means, like direct edits to files under /sys or whatever. Clearly the kernel support is there or asusctl wouldn't work: has anyone either (a) figured out a way to build and install asusctl on openrc, or (b) figured out a way to achieve any (or better still, all) of the things it achieves, without using it?

My little Zephyrus G14 is working more or less perfectly on recent (5.15+) kernels without any special tools or patches: from a quick test with xev it looks as though every special key except for the dedicated microphone mute is working (with HID_ASUS enabled)...some of them require binding the scancodes to keycodes but the kernel sees them. Bluetooth, WIFI, touchpad and speakers are all great...basically the kernel has caught up with this generation of (formerly problematic) ROG laptops and I can confirm that the Zephyrus G14 works pretty well.

Except for the functions provided by asusctl, which I'm lacking at present. The battery life is the biggest issue: it sucks on Gentoo (a couple of hours when it should be closer to a full day). I'm guessing this is largely because I'm using the Nvidia GPU, so it should be possible to improve this with something like PRIME render offload (integrated graphics for most things, Nvidia just for specific applications), but asusctl looks to be much more flexible, enabling a range of different graphics and power usage settings...I would like to get it working if possible. The lid animations would be nice but are no big deal, so I can live without asusctl's functions if a bit of fiddling with the hybrid graphics setup makes the power usage acceptable...still, asusctl or some equivalent would be nicer.

There are ebuilds for it (in overlays), but again they depend on systemd (not just libraries, but actually using it), and the developer has no interest in making it work with other init systems. Has anyone come up with any kind of a solution for this issue?

[alamahant]

From the developer

[psycho]

Thanks for giving me somewhere to start. OK, I've built asusd and it outputs "asusd should only be run from the right systemd service... do not run in your terminal... if you need logs please use journalctl -b -u asusd. asusd will now exit". So I'm not sure how that response relates to his comment about launching it from a non-systemd init script. Anyway here's the contents of asusd.service:

[grknight]

[alamahant]

[psycho]

Thanks for all these suggestions. The simple IS_SERVICE=1 trick worked...asusd attempts to launch...but immediately crashes with this output: