Software components as reusable building blocks for software are becoming widely used in software engineering. However, so far there has been little attempt to apply this programming and design paradigm in the domain of general-purpose operating systems.
This paper analyzes several nice properties of component systems which might be beneficial in operating system design, the obstacles which emerge when we want to use components as a building blocks of an operating system, proposes a component model which targets these obstacles, metrics to determine the rate of success of this approach and concludes with current work in this field.