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Cognition-OS/README.md
2026-02-08 07:53:24 -06:00

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Cognition OS

Cognition OS is an operating-system-adjacent framework that treats probabilistic inference, context, attention, and memory as schedulable, governable resources. It provides deterministic control, isolation, capability-based security, and provenance for non-deterministic computation, while keeping all learning and inference in userland services.

What this is

  • A spec + reference design for a “cognitive kernel” (control plane) and userland++ services.
  • A place to define contracts (object model, syscalls/APIs, policy model, provenance) that can be implemented on top of classic OS kernels.

What this is not

  • Not “LLMs in kernel space.”
  • Not an AGI project.
  • Not a fork of FreeBSD/Linux (at least initially).

Core principles

  • Deterministic control plane; probabilistic workers.
  • Capability-based security; no ambient authority.
  • Explicit budgets (time, compute, context, risk).
  • Provenance as a first-class output.
  • Isolation domains for workers and tools.

Repository layout

  • docs/ — narrative design docs (“why”).
  • spec/ — contracts and invariants (“must not change casually”).
  • freebsd/ — mapping to FreeBSD primitives (jails, Capsicum, kqueue, …).
  • linux/ — mapping to Linux primitives (namespaces, seccomp, LSM, epoll, …).
  • runtime/ — userland++ reference components (scheduler, tool broker, memory services).
  • examples/ — end-to-end flows and scenarios.

Getting started

Start reading:

  1. docs/000-introduction.md
  2. docs/010-design-goals.md
  3. docs/030-architecture-overview.md
  4. spec/cognitive-syscalls.md

Status

This repository is pre-implementation. The initial goal is to stabilize a minimal v0.1 contract for:

  • cognitive object model
  • cognitive syscalls/APIs
  • provenance event model
  • OS mapping notes (FreeBSD first, Linux mapping in parallel)