Glossary

Glossary

Purpose

This page defines common OSAI terms.

Terms

OSAI: A design-stage server OS for CPU-only embedded AI app agents.

AI Cell: A fixed-resource execution unit that owns cores, memory arenas, NIC queues, model mappings, source indexes, workspaces, and telemetry counters.

CPU-only AI: AI inference and agent work that does not require CUDA, Metal, GPU, or vendor accelerator runtimes.

Hot path: The latency-sensitive path from request arrival through agent inference and response.

Control plane: Slow management work such as SSH, service startup, logging, updates, Git orchestration, and supervision.

Model arena: Memory region holding model weights, preferably shared read-only and mapped with large pages where possible.

KV/cache arena: Private per-agent memory for inference state.

Shared weights: One physical model-weight copy mapped read-only into multiple AI Cells.

Core lease: Exclusive assignment of a CPU core to a cell or worker role.

Scheduler jitter: Timing variation introduced by scheduling, migration, interrupts, or unrelated OS work.

NUMA: Non-uniform memory access; memory locality matters across sockets or nodes.

QEMU: Emulator used for early OSAI bring-up on macOS.

UEFI: Firmware interface used for booting OSAI.

VirtIO: Paravirtual device model used for QEMU storage and networking.

NIC queue: Hardware or virtual network RX/TX queue.

IOMMU: I/O memory management unit for DMA protection on many x86 systems.

SMMU: ARM system memory management unit for DMA protection.