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 udisksctl utility, which can be used to trigger these operations from the command line (if permitted by PolicyKit).

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 for VFAT, xfsprogs for XFS, or cryptsetup for LUKS.