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:

docs/000-introduction.md
docs/010-design-goals.md
docs/030-architecture-overview.md
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)

CognitiveOS RFCs (Control-Plane / Kernel Primitives)

This repo includes a growing set of RFCs capturing the CognitiveOS design direction:

RFC Index: docs/RFC-INDEX.md
Kernel Roadmap: docs/KERNEL-ROADMAP.md
RFC documents: docs/rfcs/

Key primitives covered so far:

RFC-0007 Delegating Router (must-delegate invariant)
RFC-0008 Capability & Guard framework
RFC-0009 Event Ledger (append-only, hash-chained)
RFC-0010 Guarded Emit syscall
RFC-0011 Session Spawn primitive
RFC-0012 Deterministic Retry controller