Operating systems are one of the most frequently reused software components: almost every application is sitting on top of an OS which establishes the runtime platform for the application. It is claimed that bridging the gap between a high level application design and the OS is a costly process, especially in distributed systems. A conceptual framework is presented which supports the automatic generation of distributed runtime platforms from high-level application designs. It is based on the generic layout of OS interfaces, an associated generation scheme and analysis tools which filter out OS requirements from the application design.