As far as I know, the only thing rtkit deals with by default is sound (at least, the only packages that would be uninstalled if I uninstall rtkit are all related to pulseaudio). So I would guess that James's system simply doesn't have a configured sound device and that's why the log message has numbers "0". Anyway, the actual numbers do not matter, even when non-zero, they are still not worth logging continuously by default in my opinion. Thanks for the pointers in comment #6. Having read that, I think the easiest solution is to add: [Service] LogLevelMax=info to the rtkit-daemon.service file. Alternatively, we could add an option --debug to rtkit-daemon and not even generate these debug messages when the option isn't used (by the way of setlogmask()). That's some more work as a few lines of code have to be written, but it's also slightly more efficient to not generate these messages at all than to filter them out afterwards.