In the new era of cyber-physical systems, software must adapt itself to ever-changing environmental conditions and situations. This is currently not reflected in the design of embedded operating systems, since they are primarily optimized for fixed usage scenarios with tight resource constraints. We discuss the idea of interpreted operating system kernels, which can form a new foundation for highly reconfigurable embedded systems. The paper elaborates reasonable use cases, shows comparable approaches from the past and sketches an implementation strategy that is based on a bare-metal Python interpreter.