In our research, we address this goal by the automatic application--hardware tailoring of system software. Platform-specific hardware particularities are not blindly abstracted, but embraced and exploited to optimize the system software with respect to the concrete application. Our targets reach from Linux-based special-purpose systems over future parallel computing systems based on customized hardware down to automotive hard real-time systems on standard embedded platforms -- which will be the focus of the talk. The resulting systems excel with respect to many important nonfunctional properties, including memory footprint, event latency, priority obedience, and robustness against transient faults.