After five days of compilation, Gentoo Linux is installed on the Tesla Model S

A couple of months ago, the owner of the Tesla Model S, a Linux user and a fan of the Gentoo operating system under the nickname Hemera, decided to still hack their Tesla Model S car and get root rights.

The first thing she did was to open the side panel near the driver’s side door and remove the CAT 6 cable with the proprietary connector that Tesla uses from there. You can connect to it with a regular network cable, making an adapter modeled on a proprietary one, but the network is password protected.


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To get the rights of the root, I had to go around - and find another connector through which the touchscreen in the cabin connects to the network. To do this, she unscrewed the cover under the steering wheel and removed the entire dashboard cover.



Then unscrew the touchscreen (CID), attached with four screws.



After removing the touchscreen, the hacker gained access to another connector, he connects the touchscreen to a computer system, through which software updates come to the machine and commands are sent to manage various embedded systems, such as opening a sunroof.



After disconnecting the cable, the car computer goes into Factory Mode. From here you can activate Developer Mode Developer Mode with complete information about all the functional systems of the car.



When the computer went into developer mode, it's time to connect the laptop to the network interface (white cable in the side panel) and run the script to iterate the passwords.



The screenshot shows that the password was selected from the fourth attempt. Strangely enough, but the author does not give any explanations on this issue (upd: suggested in the comments that this is a joke, a reference to the film “Hackers”).

One way or another, but then she proceeded to install Gentoo instead of the original Ubuntu system, which originally comes with Tesla cars. For two weeks, she suffered from the ALSA sound subsystem, fought Xorg and Nvidia Tegra drivers, but still managed to install her beloved Gentoo on the computer and look at the Terminator on it.



Hemera is extremely pleased with the modding. She says that the sound is amazing, the SMplayer video player works completely without brakes, as she feared at the beginning.



Gentoo-arm is assembled in the chroot environment, in Tesla OS itself, the compilation took five days.

Hemera says there are still some technical difficulties left, including with Nvidia codecs and 3D drivers, but on the whole the experiment is considered successful. “Now my car will accelerate to a hundred faster than yours!” She jokes about optimized Gentoo compared to Ubuntu (see the Gentoo website for racers ).