Comment About the hacking of TiVo, and Slashdot (Score 1) 132
Hey guys,
I am Richard Bullwinkle, the Chief Evangelist for TiVo. (You may know me as TiVolutionary.)
TiVo has no official comment on the recent "hacking" of TiVo. We do not know how our hardware partners will want to react to it.
However, we did want to clarify a few things with regard to this subject.
First, we want to remind you that opening your TiVo does void your warrantee, and that anything you modify that makes your TiVo unable to connect or use the TiVo service is at your own risk. If your TiVo fails to work with our current, or any future version of the TiVo service because of hacking we would not be able to help you get it working again, or take any financial responsibility for doing so.
Also, because the Slashdot community is so large, you have flooded the AVSForum, where TiVo users discuss TiVo, thus making it unusable. See for yourself.
We don't want to come off as Big Brother in any way, but please mirror the information in that thread here, because the moderator for AVS must delete the thread to allow his forum to come back to a normal load.
Finally, I want to clear up something that has come up often, and I had to speak with our engineers to find out the details.
Many of you have asked why we haven't released the code for our file system MFS, as it might be covered by GPL. In fact, it isn't. Many of you have speculated that MFS stands for Mac File System, where in this case it is a completely proprietary system called Media File System. Here are some statements from Dave Platt, our Senior Engineer, who many of you know of:
- MFS stands for "Media File System", not "Macintosh File System".
- MFS is a completely new design and implementation, done by TiVo.
It was not based upon, and does not incorporate any GPL'ed code
from the Linux kernel or any other source.
- It isn't even really a "filesystem" in the usual Linux sense
of that phrase. None of the code having to do with the MFS
data organization is part of the kernel - it's all implemented
as a user-mode library. MFS has an application API which is
very different from a traditional Linux (or Posix) I/O
interface. It would be a difficult, frustrating, and nasty
job to implement a standard POSIX API on top of MFS (trust me,
I tried, and gave it up as a bad job).
- MFS does take advantage of a "direct access to raw disk partition,
bypassing the Linux buffer cache" API which we added to the Linux
kernel and syscall interface. We implemented this API because
the Linux kernel we used didn't have one. We've published the full
source code for this enhanced kernel on our Web site, and it's
available for anyone to use or adapt under the terms of the GPL.
Please feel free to write me should you have any questions or concerns! TiVo remains dedicated to cooperating with and supporting the Linux community.
Cheers,
Richard Bullwinkle
TiVolutionary
tivolutionary@tivo.com
I am Richard Bullwinkle, the Chief Evangelist for TiVo. (You may know me as TiVolutionary.)
TiVo has no official comment on the recent "hacking" of TiVo. We do not know how our hardware partners will want to react to it.
However, we did want to clarify a few things with regard to this subject.
First, we want to remind you that opening your TiVo does void your warrantee, and that anything you modify that makes your TiVo unable to connect or use the TiVo service is at your own risk. If your TiVo fails to work with our current, or any future version of the TiVo service because of hacking we would not be able to help you get it working again, or take any financial responsibility for doing so.
Also, because the Slashdot community is so large, you have flooded the AVSForum, where TiVo users discuss TiVo, thus making it unusable. See for yourself.
We don't want to come off as Big Brother in any way, but please mirror the information in that thread here, because the moderator for AVS must delete the thread to allow his forum to come back to a normal load.
Finally, I want to clear up something that has come up often, and I had to speak with our engineers to find out the details.
Many of you have asked why we haven't released the code for our file system MFS, as it might be covered by GPL. In fact, it isn't. Many of you have speculated that MFS stands for Mac File System, where in this case it is a completely proprietary system called Media File System. Here are some statements from Dave Platt, our Senior Engineer, who many of you know of:
- MFS stands for "Media File System", not "Macintosh File System".
- MFS is a completely new design and implementation, done by TiVo.
It was not based upon, and does not incorporate any GPL'ed code
from the Linux kernel or any other source.
- It isn't even really a "filesystem" in the usual Linux sense
of that phrase. None of the code having to do with the MFS
data organization is part of the kernel - it's all implemented
as a user-mode library. MFS has an application API which is
very different from a traditional Linux (or Posix) I/O
interface. It would be a difficult, frustrating, and nasty
job to implement a standard POSIX API on top of MFS (trust me,
I tried, and gave it up as a bad job).
- MFS does take advantage of a "direct access to raw disk partition,
bypassing the Linux buffer cache" API which we added to the Linux
kernel and syscall interface. We implemented this API because
the Linux kernel we used didn't have one. We've published the full
source code for this enhanced kernel on our Web site, and it's
available for anyone to use or adapt under the terms of the GPL.
Please feel free to write me should you have any questions or concerns! TiVo remains dedicated to cooperating with and supporting the Linux community.
Cheers,
Richard Bullwinkle
TiVolutionary
tivolutionary@tivo.com
