Abstract: The Kernel Executive which is the essential part of a distributed operating system for DRIPS,a real-time process control system,is discussed in this paper.The operating system of DRIPS consists of Kernel Executive and Communication Executive.The Kernel Executive manages processor resources,provides real-time services for application tasks and maintains intertask communications and synchronizations via the Comunication Executive.The functions and organitzation of the Kernel Executive are presented.A number of typical issues of for distributed operating systems,such as scheduling strategy,intertask communications and synchronizations,data consistency etc,are studied as to how they are solved in DRIPS.