Nikad se nisam ponosio kad bi se moje mišljenje slagalo s mišljenjem većine.

Jednom davno u drugom životu, bio sam kernel programer, i to dosta dobar. Nešto vremena nakon toga razvio sam strast za elektronikom. Dan danas, kad koristim računala bilo kakve vrste, desktop, laptop, mobiteli, sam svjestan stvari koje se događaju u pozadini dok ih koristim - interrupti koje uzrokuje touch screen, osvježavanje ekrana određenom frekvencijom i double buffering koji je potreban da se ono ne vidi, upravljanje memorijom, izolacija među procesima, IO scheduling koji odlučuje koji proces će prvi do diska, konfiguriranje DMA kontrolera dok se ti podaci zapravo prenesu, a onda pošto sam razvio i strast za elektroniku, i okidanje tranzistora na sabirnicama, kontrolerima i procesorima dok rade svoj posao. Kad je izašao prvi film Matrix, bio sam u srednjoj školi i sve ovo što sam opisao je došlo kasnije. Jednom kad je to došlo, ponovno sam se sjetio filma i pogledao ga, i onda sam si govorio u onim dijelovima filma gdje likovi "čitaju" "kod": yup, to je to, fina metafora (naravno nužno mora biti metafora, jer to je filmska umjetnost) za to kako ja vidim računala.

Negdje u 2009.-oj godini, duboko uronjen u arhitekturu Unixa, napisao sam ovaj tekst:

Since one of my fascinations is operating systems design, implementation and maintenance, ever since I've first seen the Matrix movies I've thought some of the concepts in them can be related to familiar concepts in operating systems:

The Matrix world: a running operating system, with userland (the "common" world, in which people live), and the kernel (the "Matrix" proper, the meta). Apparently it's a pretty buggy OS...

People: processes, both kernel processes and user processes. There's a big distinction between normal, "unprivileged" people, and daemons with root privileges - "agents". Root daemons can open privileged ports, kill random processes, manage memory, etc.

Matrix: the kernel. It looks like a message passing kernel, not necessarily a microkernel (though they are some microkernel aspects, such as the abundance of kernel processes, strict separation of duty between them, and the already mentioned message passing). Kernel manages all processes, and performs operations on their behalf (such as keeping them alive, servicing them and recycling them). But there's an apparent security defect: some userland processes can (because of a bug) transfer and execute parts of their programs in the kernel space. Only certain syscalls are affected (the "phones"), and this kind of privilege escalation garbles the userland process' return stack, such that if the process receives a signal, it segfaults and is garbage collected (if you're killed in the Matrix, you're dead for real).

Oracle: the process (task) scheduler. Has all the numbers from process monitoring (resource usage) and knows in advance (broadly) how to schedule them to run to their optimum.

Agents: system monitoring / intrusion detection / prevention system (IDS / IPS) with heuristical operation. Most of them have a kernel part (kernel module) but are basically daemons run with superuser privileges in the userland. They are tasked to find and kill processes which attempt to violate system security.

The trainman: kernel-userland gateway / message passing queue. You've got to go through him if you want to validly pass data between userland and kernel. You also might be stuck in the queue forever.

The Merovingian: networking / IPC stack. It's his business to know everything going on between processes. Has a bug manifesting in occasional input / output data corruption.

Vampires / ghosts: compatibility shims for older API / KPI versions. Their code is rudimentary and, for historical reasons, interfaces with parts of kernel normal processes shouldn't (i.e. they have lots of layering violations).

The Architect: kernel monitoring infrastructure (hypervisor), tasked with monitoring processes, killing those that wedge and restarting those that crashed. Since it's a realtime high-availability OS, the debugging and monitoring infrastructure has the absolute highest priority and is "blessed" to be infallible (thus, to limit the possibility of error, is very limited in its complexity). It's been misconfigured to be overzealous, does availability checking too often, taking too many resources, and so interferes with the normal operation of the operating system.

Keymaster: security / privilege subsystem. It's stable, but unfortunately relies on the VM system and the IPC system which are buggy, and can be exploited by processes to gain more privileges from him.

THE PLOT: There's a design bug between the VM (virtual memory) system, the process management system and the scheduler, manifesting under high system load (lots of processes, high memory pressure). It is a compound error, which results in at least three things:

Memory pages can get corrupt or missasigned to processes that don't own them. Since kernel and userland share the VM, processes on either side can end up with memory pages from the other, revealing sensitive data and making way for security escalations. Mixing up the VM pages bypasses address space protection between the processes.

The IPC subsystem, bad as it already is, gets even worse when its data structures get corrupted or the memory load gets so high it deadlocks waiting for buffers.

The system monitor goes berserk, killing and restarting processes in a loop, unaware that it makes the things worse by building additional memory pressure and process load, eventually greatly helping spread the VM pages corruption between the processes.

Agent Smith: privileged IPC daemon with part of it implemented as a kernel module. It's so closely tied with the kernel module part that it shares data structures with it without sanity checking. Once it was killed by another privileged process, but it was in the middle of a syscall so when the monitor restarted him, the corruption which was already done to its process descriptor resulted in most of its program being executed in the kernel context. It continued to work in this corrupted state for a long time, wedged in a loop, erroneously tagging processes as security breaches and overwriting some of their memory pages with its own.

Neo: Initially a userland network server process, the VM corruption resulted in it being assigned both superuser privileges and high priority (CPU time). Eventually, it got its executable memory pages mixed up with the IDS process Smith, but not the data pages. Before long it also starts killing processes, including Smith and his corrupted copies.

THE ENDING: process Smith eventually tries to kill the scheduler process, but since it's itself scheduled by it, cannot do so reliably. The system gets wedged because the scheduler cannot perform its tasks anymore, including interrupt servicing, but the part of Smith's code in the scheduler's VM image (which is accidentally also the part shared with process Neo) still runs. Since there are only two processes running, they both are trying to kill each other. Meanwhile, since interrupts are no longer being served, the hardware watchdog timer wakes up, inserts a NMI, which wakes up the monitoring system. It decides the system is in a critical state and proceeds to kill all processes, then restarts them to bring the system up again. The End.

Post mortem analysis: There appears to be an inherent flaw in the design of the operating system, especially in the VM, IPC and monitoring subsystems, resulting in a global memory corruption among processes and critical failure of address space protection for a small number of processes.

Recommendation: More fine tuning is needed to settle out the proper process priorities, reduce priority inversions and imbalance. VM system probably needs to be rewritten and IDS system replaced with a less resource intensive version. System monitor needs to be modified not to start extensive operations if the system load is above a threshold.

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There! An interpretation of The Matrix without involving "free will" in any way.

I danas se divim konceptu i idejama koje sam tada uspio staviti na papir.

U relativno kratkom razmaku sam gledao zadnjeg Spidermana i zadnji Matrix, i imao snažno drugačije reakcije. Ne u smislu da je jedan dobar a drugi nije, nego jednostavno - drugačije. I palo mi je napamet: sve u svoje vrijeme, to su filmovi za ljude u različitim vremenima života.

Spiderman: No Way Home je superhero movie za tinejdžere i ljude u (ranim) 20-ima, i osnovna tema kojom se bavi je prijateljstvo. Kako naći prijatelje? Braću po interesima ili uvjerenjima? Kako se spojiti i razlikovati od okoline. Što tinejdžeri žele? Prijatelje, prihvaćanje okoline uz postizanje individualnosti. Originalni Matrix je superhero movie za skupinu young adults, 20-te uglavnom, možda rane 30-te, i glavna tema je sloboda. Izašli smo iz škole, upoznali okrutni svijet rada za život, korporacije, i želimo slobodu. Osobnu slobodu za sebe, a ako usput možemo spasiti svijet, tim bolje. Matrix 4: Ressurections je superhero movie za sredovječne. Njegov kraj govori baš o tome što ljudi te dobi najviše žele: "A second chance."

Sam film mi je ok. Čini mi se dosta zbrzan, kao da su imali materijala za 4 sata ili 3 filma koje su kimeralizirali u jedan.

Prva trećina filma, koja se gotovo u potpunosti događa u "fiktivnoj" firmi koja proizvodi igre (ili filmove, same difference), je brutalan i ciničan pogleda na ovu industriju danas. Radilo se o Matrixu ili ne, te scene gdje zaposlenici brainstormaju kako biti originalan u četvrtom nastavku su zlato. Komotno je to mogao biti film za sebe, cijelo vrijeme insinuirajući da se događa nešto drugo i veće od samih likova, da likovi igraju dvostruke uloge koje zapravo i igraju, i da se stvori epic awesome predigra za konačnu realizaciju da je sve stvarno.

Druga trećina, spašavanje Nea, je opet mogao biti film za sebe, od toga što i zašto se dogodilo u Zionu / IO-u, očito i tamo ima nekih disidenata koji su možda (ne)zadovoljni stanjem svog svijeta. Koncept da umjetne inteligencije mogu izaći i djelovati u stvarni svijet (i) putem fizičkih holograma i robota zaslužuje ogromnu razradu i istraživanje posljedica. Cammeo umjetne inteligencije "Merovingian" je mogao biti savršena prilika za razvoj karaktera svih umjetnih inteligencija.

Treća trećina, spašavanje Trinity i rasplet, je opet film za sebe, u Matrixu 4 zbrzan do neprepoznatljivosti, sa očitim propustima da se prikažu ili opišu koraci plana, sa trivijaliziranjem tema koje su mogle biti razrađene na jako epic način. Agentu Smithu je totalno napravljen disservice jer je u ovom dijelu mogao ponovno biti epic, a i glumac nije pogođen.

Izgleda mi kao da je zapravo postojao plan, ali je prekrojen do razine smeća.

Svidjeli su mi se drugi i treći Matrix - nisu imali tako puno novih koncepata i filozofske pozadine kao 1 i 4, ali svidjeli su mi se kao cool akcijski filmovi, u skladu s anime uzorima. Ne mora sve uvijek biti intelekturalno. Pošto uživam u djelima kao što su Neon Genesis Evangelion i Akira, posve mi je ok imati i dijelove koji su "mozak na pašu." Kao i kod takvih anime djela, i u Matrixima se ponekad nabacuje konceptima koji izgledaju high-brow ali se nikad propisno ne razviju, i to im je možda najveća mana.

Matrix 4 mi je ok, iako je na kraju editiran u film koji postoji da sredovječnim ljudima da drugu šansu.