I am sure we have all heard or seen the joke that starts off "If Microsoft made cars..." and tells of the problems we would have with our automobiles. I saw this snippet from a news article about the new Google phone OS.

GOOGLE REPAIRS ANDROID

Google's Android OS may be small (small enough to drive the new Google phone) but it has plenty of code, it seems, for hackers to attack. Case in point: Last week, researchers showed how hackers can take over the phone by tricking the user into going to a malicious Web page. With that control, your passwords could be stolen, no matter how many obscure letters and characters they contain.
The patch is now out and requires a simple restart.

My first thought was "If Google made phones..." but then I got more serious in my  thinking process and wondered about the last line stating the phone needed a simple restart. I wondered why they needed the restart.

That got me to thinking about patching and why it is so hard. I like the idea of a modular OS with a small kernel and services that run on top of it so you only have to reboot when the kernel is updated. That should be an infrequent event. UNIX and its derivatives have always been there, Windows is getting there. I dream of the day when the OS is a bootstrapper with just a few lines of code and the kernel itself is so modular that when you have to patch it a new process can be spun up and the old processes can be allowed to "drain down"  until it is not being used any more and can be killed.

I was hoping that Windows 7 would move even closer to this ideal but from what I saw at PDC it is an evolutionary and not a revolutionary change over the kernel in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Maybe the next version of Windows will get us closer.

Many years ago I wrote an operating system and I realize it is not all that easy to do. I suspect that beyond the technical challenges, the cost to develop the OS would make it too expensive for Microsoft or another company to take on as a project. I have a hard time seeing this as an open source project. Not because it couldn't be done, but because I see it needing hardware support and I don't think Intel or AMD would change their architecture to support this without the promise of it helping to sell their products.

I may never see this OS but I can still dream.