udisks handles operations such as querying, mounting, unmounting, formatting, or disconnecting storage devices
in our day to day Being on the computer we usually use a large number of applications whether they are productivity, office automation, leisure, games, etc. But there are many applications that we are so used to using that we overlook them and do not take into account that they are also a part of our system.
A very practical example that perhaps many of our enthusiastic readers at some point happened to them with their Android smartphones, when trying some vanilla ROM or X ROM they realized that they did not have a file manager, they had to resort to installing one , when in theory it should already be integrated into the system.
In the article of Today I will tell you about an excellent tool Although it may seem simple, it is not and, above all, it can become a part of your Swiss army knife of applications for managing storage devices in your system.
About UDisks
The application is "UDisks" which provides a daemon, tools and libraries for access and manipulate disks, storage devices and related technologies.
UDisks provides a D-Bus API for working with disk partitions, configuring MD RAID, working with block devices in a file (loop mounting), manipulating file systems, etc. In addition, modules are provided to monitor and manage BTRFS, iSCSI, libStorageManagement, LVM2, and LVM Cache.
For example, UDisks is used in GNOME applications to work with disk partitions and various graphical configurators.
As well D-Bus API is provided, a library, libudisks2. this library can be used from C/C++ and any compatible high-level language with GObjectIntrospection as Javascript and Python. Udisks are only indirectly involved in what devices and objects are displayed in the user interface.
The application recently received a new update which arrives almost after two years of development, reaching its new version «UDisks 2.10.0″ which brings a lot of changes internals, while keeping the promise of API stability. This development cycle was mainly driven by the libblockdev 3.0 API revision which brought several notable changes.
One of the changes that stands out is the native NVMe support (libnvme) by parity of features with ATA drives, such as health monitoring, device self-tests, secure erase, and extended identification. Also added basic knowledge about NVMe over Fabrics and a simple launcher. In a simplified D-Bus interface view, NVMe drivers are mapped to drive objects and NVMe namespaces to block objects.
Another change that stands out in the new version is that a major internal review has been carried out, which did not affect compatibility at the API level. The code for working with disk partitions has been translated to use the libfdisk library. Definitions of supported file systems have been moved to libblockdev, unification of file system operations has been carried out.
In addition to that, also extended syntax of custom mount options is highlighted (separate FS driver and FS signature, added ability to determine priority of properties for driver).
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Added support for identifying devices by tag and partition UUID.
- Added the ability to bind UUIDs to partitions and file systems.
- Added support for LVM2 RAID.
- Improvements in bash and zsh completion
- Improvements in event handling of the lvm2 module
- Removed the kbd and vdo libblockdev plugins, as well as the zram, bcache and vdo modules.
- FIPS mode fixes
- Added support for resolving devices by PARTLABEL and PARTUUID
- Full support for setting file systems and partition UUIDs
- Dynamic cleanup of mount point names and ACL fixes
- Added support for LVM2 RAID
- Added an option to force/prevent the creation of an mdraid write intent bitmap.
Finally If you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link
How to install UDisks in Linux?
UDisks is included natively in those distributions that have GNOME as default environment, in its graphical front-end in the gnome-disk-utility package. But it can be found in almost all the repositories of the most popular distributions.
For example, in Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives, just type the following command:
sudo apt-get install -y udisks
While on Arch Linux and derivatives:
sudo pacman -S udisks2
In the case of those who are users of Fedora and derived from it:
sudo dnf -y install udisks2
Finally for openSUSE:
zypper install udisks2