Talos v1.10.3 extensions

[danieljkemp]

I recently upgraded a node to 1.10.3, and in the process I changed the image to one from image factory that had one addition extension (kata containers)

After the upgrade, there are no extensions listed under node labels and talosctl -n <node> get extensions has zero output

From reading the docs, extensions can be activated during install or upgrade, so I certainly didn't expect to end up with zero extensions active. Is there something I am missing here?

[smira]

If you upgraded to 1.10.3 installer image coming from the Image Factory which has the extensions, and on boot you don't see the extensions, this is totally unexpected, but there might some things which can trigger it:

• your machine is not booting from disk, it is actually e.g. PXE booting all the time from some fixed image which has no extensions
• your upgrade failed and Talos automatically rolled back to the previous version for example

For the first one, you have to look into boot logs to see how you machine got booted, for the second one try watching logs during the upgrade with e.g. talosctl dmesg -f to see if you can see some error, or if the machine rolls back itself back to the previous version on the next boot.

[danieljkemp]

I ran upgrade on the node again, and saved the dmsg long of the entire cycle (previous boot to upgrade to boot after upgrade) and confirm that the extensions are not shown still

[smira]

talos-is-1: user: warning: [2025-06-04T13:39:06.311439599Z]: [talos] upgrade request received: staged false, force false, reboot mode DEFAULT
talos-is-1: user: warning: [2025-06-04T13:39:06.311473599Z]: [talos] validating "ghcr.io/siderolabs/installer:v1.10.3"

you're installing vanilla Talos without any extensions, how would you expect it to have extensions?

[danieljkemp]

the image used was this

customization:
    systemExtensions:
        officialExtensions:
            - siderolabs/i915
            - siderolabs/intel-ice-firmware
            - siderolabs/intel-ucode
            - siderolabs/kata-containers

My understanding is that the image specified has the extensions included. The breaking changes section mentions that machine.install.extensions is has no effect, but I wasn't using that in the talos config previously, so I had assumed that using an image with the extensions included would be valid.

The boot assets doc page details how to include extensions in an image, but it is my understanding that the image factory does those steps.

Further adding to my confusion is that this node was previously on 1.10.0 with extensions active, and the only change was changing the image factory image to include the kata containers extension

[smira]

I provided the part of the log your submitted yourself which indicates the image you are using in fact.

So I think your question is answered - you are using vanilla Talos installer image vs. the one with extensions.

[danieljkemp]

yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup ok I got it......

the chain of events was this:

• Wanted to add an extension
• Got a new image id from image factory
• Updated machine config and applied it with a reboot
• didn't see the extension added
• saw that extensions would only be activated on install/upgrade
• ran upgrade with no arguments and had mistakenly assumed it would default to the image in the machine config <- this is where I went wrong
• ended up with a vanilla 1.10.3 install, with a machine config that still had an image with the extensions

Thanks so much for your help and patience !

Edit: Probably a low priority or even a bad idea, but I wonder, what percentage of installs use zero extensions? Maybe a warning if image ID changes, or a notice that a vanilla image is installed when extensions had been added previously? My gut tells me most will have some firmware or cloud guest agent installed, but maybe I'm totally off the mark.