The udisks daemon serves as an interface to system block devices, implemented via d-bus. it handles operations such as querying, mounting, unmounting, formatting, or detaching storage devices such as hard disks or usb thumb drives.

this package also provides the udisks utility, which can be used to trigger these operations from the command line (if permitted by policykit). external tools such as hdparm are used if available to implement extra operations, such as configuring disk spindown times.

creating or modifying file systems such as xfs, raid, or luks encryption requires that the corresponding mkfs.* and admin tools are installed, such as dosfstools and mtools for vfat, xfsprogs for xfs, or cryptsetup for luks.