Methods, apparatus, and products are disclosed for providing policy-based operating system services in a hypervisor on a computing system. The computing system includes at least one compute node. The compute node includes an operating system and a hypervisor. The operating system includes a kernel. The hypervisor comprising a kernel proxy and a plurality of operating system services of a service type. Providing policy-based operating system services in a hypervisor on a computing system includes establishing, on the compute node, a kernel policy specifying one of the operating system services of the service type for use by the kernel proxy, and accessing, by the kernel proxy, the specified operating system service. The computing system may also be implemented as a distributed computing system that includes one or more operating system service nodes. One or more of the operating system services may be distributed among the operating system service nodes.