Oz architecture

Oz was created to facilitate the automatic installation of guest operating systems. One of the key features of the design is that it always uses the native operating system tools to do installs. This ensures that after installation, the disk image that Oz leaves behind is exactly the same as if the installation CD had been used on a bare-metal machine.

Oz has the ability to do 3 major things:

1. Install operating systems.
2. Customize operating systems.
3. Generate metadata (ICICLE) about operating systems.

Each of the three operations can be done together, individually, or not at all.

Install operating systems

The first operation that Oz can do is to install operating systems. By default, Oz has enough built-in knowledge to install minimal operating systems with little input. Oz just needs to be told which operating system to install, and where the installation media is, and it can do the rest. The steps that Oz goes through to do an operating system install are roughly: