Talos Templates

[kyzrfranz]

As Talos has gained quite a bit of significance, I would like to find out how it may be possible to get lima support this on a native level.

Running talos on lima of course works (ish) but there are some things that may need to be addressed on your end to make it smoother and more robust. For instance since talos doesn't allow ssh there should be a way to disable this and so on.

Maybe this is already possible and i have just not sound it, but i am asking more in the directio.nwhether a talos template would make sense in your example section?

[afbjorklund]

I don't think it is only ssh, afaik it doesn't have any shell either?

And I am not aware of how the support level for cloud-init is?

So it might be similar to CoreOS et al...

• Flatcar Container Linux support #1372 (comment)

Except even less accessible, as a Lima OS

It might be more appropriate to use the upstream VM setup

Some other systems already have their own QEMU setup too

https://docs.siderolabs.com/talos/latest/platform-specific-installations/local-platforms/qemu

[afbjorklund]

"Talos is managed by a single, declarative gRPC API. This is the most unique thing about Talos and something Talos users love.
Imagine a Linux distribution that had configuration management built in. That didn’t have fragile cloud-init scripts that wrap bash scripts in yaml." <-- seems that they already have a description of Lima on their home page :-)

[kyzrfranz]

Thanks for the quick reply, and pls apologise me being not precise enough.

As you mention, there is potentially a lot more to consider about Talos & Lima.
Currently I am in a stage that I would very much love to explore this further, but there are some things that make it difficult.
For one, the way that Lima seems to need ssh to check whether the vm is running.
As you mentioned, Talos is API only, which means that there would be a need for tackling some of these things differently.

What I was really asking is, if there is any interest in finding out how it would be possible to integrate a support for these kinds of OS (and there will be more coming in the future because it is the direction where platform/infra is heading).

[afbjorklund]

I don't know, I partially implemented support for a semi-accessible (read-only) OS without cloud-init and didn't like the result...

• Add example for Fedora CoreOS, running ignition not cloud-init #1653
• Add support for ignition to cidata, for CoreOS #2139

Since core functionality (lima) would be broken, and none of the Lima templates would work, I'm not sure what to use it for?

[kyzrfranz]

I agree this may be tough , but from where I currently stand I do not see too many issues altogether as Talos generally runs well on Lima. However, making automation & dev-ex a little better, I am thinking about ways to allow lima to deactivate some things and then it may already be enough.
I wouldn't want to turn it all upside-down, so I get your point there. But my impression is - it's doable and not much changes needed.

[afbjorklund]

It might be easier to understand with some example, showing what works and what does not work. Like the CoreOS above.

But it doesn't sound like a natural fit for Lima, seeing as how it doesn't like: 1) cloud-init 2) bash 3) yaml - but uses an API?

[kyzrfranz]

yeah its 100% API, let me put a sample together so you can actually see what i mean