Development of the UDisks package has been completed after two years, with the release of UDisks 2.11.0. This release includes a system background process, libraries, and tools for organizing access and managing disks, storage devices, and related technologies. UDisks provides a D-Bus API for various disk-related operations such as working with disk partitions, setting up MD RAID, handling block devices in a file (loop mount), and manipulating file systems. Additionally, modules for monitoring and managing BTRFS, iSCSI, libStorageManagement, LVM2, and LVM Cache are also included. GNOME applications use UDisks for working with GNOME disk partitions and various graphical configurators.
In the new version of UDisks 2.11.0, several enhancements have been implemented:
- Support for the ATA SMART technology has been revamped. Drive diagnostic operations utilizing ATA SMART have been transitioned to the libblockdev library, which now incorporates two plugins – one based on libatasmart (by default) and another based on smartmontools (experimental). The code for monitoring drive temperature has been revised, and an additional layer for checking SMART attributes has been incorporated.
- An assembly option “–disable-smart” has been introduced to deactivate drive diagnostic code using ATA SMART. The udev property ID_ATA_SMART_ACCESS can be used to selectively disable ATA SMART in relation to drivers.
- Flags representing the capabilities of the ATA subsystem are now predominantly retrieved using udev.
- New methods have been added to the API, including Manager.GetDrives(), Block.RestoreEncryptedHeader(), Encrypted.Convert(), Encrypted.HeaderBackup(), Filesystem.BTRFS.[Get|Set]DefaultSubvolumeID(), and Loop.SetCapacity().