How to restart polkitd?
Solution 1
The man page for polkitd says:
... Users or administrators should never need to start this daemon as it will be automatically started by dbus-daemon(1) ...
Therefore polkitd will be restarted when dbus
service is restarted. Since this service interacts with the desktop manager it is safer to log out of the desktop session, stop xdm
service, restart dbus
and start xdm
again.
Solution 2
You should run:
invoke-rc.d dbus restart
as root.
Solution 3
I have been encountering the polkitd memory leak in my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop.
I use the command
ps -ef | grep polkitd
to find the process ID and then use kill -9 procid
The polkitd process will be killed but it will be started again by the system. And the polkitd process will once again start leaking memory.
Solution 4
When using systemd, restarting polkit is as easy as: sudo systemctl restart polkitd.service
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Dmitri Chubarov
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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Dmitri Chubarov over 1 year
My desktop PC is also used as a NIS/NFS server for a small workgroup. It runs for months without reboot.
Recently I observed that when I log into a desktop session the computer becomes less responsive for several minutes. A
polkitd
process in aD
state generates a lot of disk I/O activity. Its VmSize is over 600MB and its VmRSS is over 400MB.The machine is still on OpenSUSE 11.3 with polkit 0.96. I plan to upgrade in the summer.
There are several reports of memory leaks in polkitd that were fixed in 0.98 (freedesktop.org, opensuse.org). While upgrading will probably solve the problem it would take about a day and I am looking for a quick fix.
There is no polkitd script in /etc/init.d and the parent for the polkitd process is
init
itself.PID PPID USER CMD .... 22362 1 root /usr/lib/polkit-1/polkitd
Question: How do I restart polkitd without rebooting the system? Can I do it from within a desktop session or should I log off the desktop session and log on to the text console?
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Dmitri Chubarov almost 10 yearsOn Linux you could also use
pgrep
to get the process ID as inpgrep polkitd
. And alsopkill
to kill the process with the name that matches a given pattern. -
derobert almost 10 yearsDoes SIGTERM really not work? SIGKILL is a last resort, not a first...
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Push almost 9 yearsThanks. I found out that even on a headless (text-mode only) OpenSuSE you can do
rcdbus restart
. Needed this whenzypper ps
indicated thatpolkitd
was using a deleted file and needed to be restarted after azypper dup
(I run Tumbleweed on some systems) orzypper up
(on regular releases). -
roaima over 8 yearsIsn't this a subset of the answer offered by Dmitri Chubarov?