I was trying to optimize a minimum memory VM and realized that this process was taking up over 560M of virt memory. On googling, it seems to be a known issue and doesn't seem to be needed except for graphical desktop. Although virt memory isn't actual memory usage, the daemon is still taking up almost 4MB of limited memory, which on a VM with only 384MB feels relatively significant to me. Earlier in May, there was also a mailing list thread that indicates removing console-kit-daemon requires getting rid of hal as well. Is it safe to remove both console-kit and hal for headless console-only web application VMs that also needs mdadm?