Comment 5 for bug 454371

This appears to be a problem with the 2.6.31 kernel drivers.

From Jaron Wilson on the LIRC mailing list:
The root of the problem is that the i2c client model changed significantly
in 2.6.31, and some drivers (such as the cx18 driver for the HVR-1600)
weren't updated soon enough for the 2.6.31 window, meaning even ir-kbd-
i2c is broken with them as well. What needs to happen is some
patchification of those drivers in a 2.6.31.x stable release, I think
(going to ping some v4l/dvb folks on that).

What we did on Dave's box is build the cx18 driver (well, all v4l-dvb
drivers) from v4l-dvb mercurial, and all was well again.

Short version:

hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb
cd v4l-dvb
make
make install

If you get errors about some driver or another not building, if its
one you don't need, you can disable it from being built in v4l/
Makefile.media (the firedtv driver was failing on Dave's system for
some reason).

If you update your kernel to another that still doesn't have the
required i2c fixage in it, you'll lose the fixes from v4l-dvb, but can
get 'em back by going back into that v4l-dvb checkout and rebuilding
(after doing a 'make distclean' so the build uses the new kernel
headers instead of the prior one).