A few people mentioned on my last blog post that instead of nagging the user to unplug or restart, we should just rebind the device. I didn’t do this yesterday as it was quite hard to do the layering correctly as the session is running as a normal user.
But of course, doing things correctly is often harder than doing things quickly. I’ve merged an optional helper into PackageKit that just pokes the hardware in the right place to make it rebind and re-request firmware. This is all done using the pkexec functionality in PolicyKit1, and a custom policy rule.
If you want this new functionality you need to build contrib/device-rebind in the PackageKit project, and also have GUdev and PolicyKit1 installed. If you don’t have these things, the session will fall back to just asking the user to reboot.
Ohh, and if the rebind fails in any way, we just fall back to asking the user to re-plug or restart like we did before. Device rebind functionality is currently Linux specific, but patches for other operating systems welcome.