Hi

Do i need polkitd daemon on the Squeeze/Wheezy Workstations?
What exactly won't work if I remove and howto deinstall it?

You NEED it. Policykit is a security related daemon - it restricts/permits actions based on defined policies.

Actions like - queries made by udisks, upower for auto-mount drives, like usb sticks, external hdds, sleep, hibernate etc go through policykit - and will fail if policykit isnt present.

Policykit also requires a front end for authentication if needed - policykit-1-gnome, lxpolkit or the kde equivalent.

The settings files for it are in:

directory in xml format and can be modified if needed.

Even when it's behaving (which isn't often lately) polkitd is consuming about 6 of the total CPU (6 so on CPU 36% of the time) on my system. I fail to see how this much CPU use can be justified. This is either a badly implemented piece of software or the whole concept of using a daemon to manage security is a bad idea. I suspect the latter. Managing security is the kernel's job and can be done on demand rather than having this monster chewing up all my CPU and making my system unresponsive.

Correction to CPU use: my system has 6 cores with 2 threads so polkitd is actually consuming CPU 72% of the time when it's behaving itself. Often it's using 24% of the total which means it using multiple threads more or less continuously.

Is there no way that I can rid my system of this beast?

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