I do not if this is an exact duplicate of 2944, but when I attemp to shutdown the system via "shutdown", it hangs at "Setting hardware clock using the system clock [UTC] ..." However a "halt" stops the system immediately. Where is the script that sets the hardware clock located? My OpenRc version string is "openrc (OpenRC) 0.21 (Arch Linux)".
That script is /etc/init.d/hwclock. Also, you might want to upgrade to 0.21.2 because there was a fix in that version wrt the way we call hwclock, see #584722. Once you are running 0.21.2, feel free to re-open this if there is still an issue.