Sidero Talos Linux - Support for Trident

[arctic frost]

Kind of being the messenger here, was recently involved in a discussion in the Sidero Slack where a user was asking if Talos was compatible with Astra Trident.

Talos Linux uses a system extension framework to provide required drivers and tools into the images. You can find examples at https://factory.talos.dev/. The system extensions repo is here https://github.com/siderolabs/extensions

Using the information from https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/trident/trident-use/worker-node-prep.html#selecting-the-right-tools it should be possible to build out some of these as extensions and test that Trident works on Talos Linux.

Is this something that the Trident team can pick up? Happy to help, just don't have all the equipment available to test all the different drivers/tools.

[young pawn]

The only thing you need in the Linux images is either nfs-utils (if you intend to use NFS) or iscsi-utils (or open-iscsi depending on what the package is called)
These two are pretty standard for almost any Linux distro...

[arctic frost]

I know what is required, Talos is different. It will need the extensions building and a PR to the repo, iscsi-tools are in the image factory already and I’ll test those when I get a moment. The rest will need building.

[young pawn]

From what I understand, NFS is included in Talos and iSCSI uses (as you already Said) the "iscsi-tools" Extension. I'm not sure I'd trust my k8s environment on a Linux system that seems to openly ridicule and belittle both iSCSI and NFS though. I guess if you encounter any trouble with those, they will probably just tell you to "use ceph" or something 🤔

[cunning solstice]

@blissful igloo anything you can enable here from the Trident perspective? Regardless of Darkstar's points, it would still be valuable/cool to have a system extension for Talos. Something we can add?

[blissful igloo]

Darkstar has pretty well covered it. If something specific is needed to be changed in Trident, you are better off opening a GitHub issue for trident. https://github.com/NetApp/trident/issues

[cunning solstice]

No, it's not about that. It's more about contributing it natively into Talos as an extension in their system-extensions due to the nature of the secure kernel. Trident can't backdoor mount.nfs the way it typically does. They appear to be open to adding it if someone is willing to do the PR on their side.

Not trying to change trident

Jason and I thought it would be good to come straight to the source rather than having a 3rd party trying to do it (improperly) on their own.

[arctic frost]

@blissful igloo It’s not that there’s a needed change in Trident, it’s more that Talos is a different type of Container OS, it’s very minimal and you add signed extensions into it if you have to add things that aren’t in the default. So it has a baseline and then in image factory you can add other extensions.

So out of the box it won’t have all the host tools required for Trident to mount volumes. That’s what the original question in the Sidero Slack was about. The Sidero team are happy to have the PRs and include the tools into the image factory so someone wanting to run Talos with Trident will be able to pull a schematic that works, but they don’t have the capacity to test it. Hence the request.

I can test iSCSI/NFS on my own most likely as I can use the cloud versions for that. I probably can’t test NVMe/TCP currently as I don’t have any hardware at my disposal.