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For critical changes, refer to the upgrade notes.

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Important changes

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talosctl debug

Talos Linux now provides a way to run and attach to the privileged debug container with a user-provided container image. The debug container might be used for troubleshooting and debugging purposes.

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Container Image Signature Verification

Talos now supports machine-wide container image signature verification via the new ImageVerificationConfig machine config document. Any image which gets pulled on the node will be verified against the configured rules, and if no rule matches, it will be pulled without verification.

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NVIDIA GPU Support

Talos switched to using CDI and now supports configuring NVIDIA GPU via the gpu-operator helm chart. See the upgrade notes for more details on how to configure NVIDIA GPU support in Talos.

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Flannel CNI with Network Policy Support

Talos Linux now supports optionally deploying Flannel CNI with network policy support enabled. The network policy implementation is kube-network-policies. To enable Flannel CNI with network policy support, use the following machine configuration patch: 
cluster:
  network:
    cni:
      name: flannel
      flannel:
        kubeNetworkPoliciesEnabled: true
(If the cluster is already running, sync the bootstrap manifests after applying the patch to deploy the new CNI configuration.)

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Kubernetes Bootstrap Manifests

Talos now uses inventory-backed server-side apply when applying bootstrap manifests (including extraManifests and inlineManifests). Purging of unneeded manifests is automatically performed by talosctl upgrade-k8s. The switch and inventory backfill is automatic and no action is needed from the user.

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Upgrade Flow

Talos now exposes install and upgrade operations via the LifecycleService API, enabling programmatic installs and upgrades through a single, consistent interface. The legacy upgrade API is deprecated; new integrations should migrate to LifecycleService for future compatibility. talosctl upgrades now route through LifecycleService, aligning CLI behavior with the new install/upgrade API and unifying the upgrade path. This change is transparent to users but standardizes the backend used for upgrades. A user-facing change is that upgrade process (running new boot assets) happens while the machine is still running workloads, followed by a machine reboot wrapped with Kubernetes node drain and uncordon. Draining the node is now optional.

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Storage Subsystem

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External Volumes

Talos now supports virtiofs-based external volumes via the new ExternalVolumeConfig document. The virtiofs external volumes are not supported when SELinux is running in enforcing mode.

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Negative Max Volume Size

Negative max size represents the amount of space to be left free on the device, rather than the size the volume should consume. For example:
  • a max size of “-10GiB” means the volume can grow to the available space minus 10GiB.
  • a max size of “-25%” means the volume can grow to the available space minus 25%.

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Network Subsystem

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KubeSpan Configuration

A new KubeSpanConfig document has been introduced to configure KubeSpan settings. It replaces and deprecates the previous method of configuring KubeSpan via the .machine.network.kubespan field. The old configuration field will continue to work for backward compatibility. KubeSpan now supports filtering of advertised networks using the excludeAdvertisedNetworks field in the KubeSpanConfig document. This allows users to specify a list of CIDRs to exclude from the advertised networks. Please note that routing must be symmetric for any pair of peers, so if one peer excludes a certain network, the other peer must also exclude it. In other words, for any given pair of peers, and any pair of their addresses, the traffic should either go through KubeSpan or not, but not one way or the other.

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LinkAliasConfig Pattern-Based Multi-Alias

LinkAliasConfig now supports pattern-based alias names using %d format verb (e.g. net%d). When the alias name contains a %d format verb, the selector is allowed to match multiple links. Each matched link receives a sequential alias (e.g. net0, net1, …) based on hardware address order of the links. Links already aliased by a previous config are automatically skipped. This enables creating stable aliases from any N links using a single config document, useful for BondConfig and BridgeConfig member interfaces on varying hardware.

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ProbeConfig

The TCPProbeConfig configuration document allows to configure TCP probes for network reachability checks. This allows to define a custom connectivity condition instead of Talos default condition (whether a default gateway exists).

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ResolverConfig

The nameservers configuration in machine configuration now overwrites any previous layers (defaults, platform, etc.) when specified. Previously a smart merge was performed to keep IPv4/IPv6 nameservers from lower layers if the machine configuration specified only one type.

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Routing Rules Support

Talos now supports configuring Linux routing rules via the new RoutingRuleConfig machine config document.

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VRF Support

Talos now supports VRF (Virtual Routing and Forwarding) via the new VRFConfig machine config document.

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Kubernetes

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Component Configuration Extra Arguments

Several Talos configuration fields that previously accepted single string values for extra arguments have been updated to accept slices of strings as well. This includes fields such as .cluster.apiServer.extraArgs.
Note: If you were relying on the resources EtcdConfigs, KubeletConfigs, ControllerManagerConfigs, SchedulerConfigs or APIServerConfigs, the protobuf format has changed from map<string,string> to map<string,message>.

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Service Account Issuer

In API Server, passing extra args with service-account-issuer will append them after default value. This allows easy migration, e.g. by changing .cluster.controlPlane.endpoint to new value, and keeping the old value in .cluster.apiServer.extraArgs["service-account-issuer"].

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Miscellaneous

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Linux Kernel built with ThinLTO

Talos now uses a kernel built using Clang compiler, and optimized using ThinLTO. This should bring a small performance improvement, alongside some hardening features, such as BTI on supported ARM systems.

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Dynamic Linux Kernel Preemption Model

Talos Linux now defaults to dynamic Linux kernel preemption model, the default value none matches previous version, but now with kernel argument preempt= the preemption model can be changed. See Linux kernel documentation for more information on supported values. This change only applies to amd64 (x86_64) architecture.

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Container Image Decompression

Talos now ships with igzip (amd64) and pigz (arm64) to speed up container image decompression.

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/proc/PID/mem Access Hardening

A new kernel parameter proc_mem.force_override=never has been introduced by default to enhance system security by preventing unwanted writes to protected process memory via /proc/PID/mem. If the kernel parameter is removed, default behavior is restored, allowing access only if the process is traced.

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Container Device Interface

Talos now enables CDI by default. System extensions can bring in dynamic CDI spec files under /run/cdi.

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Resource Viewer in Interactive Dashboard

The interactive dashboard now includes a resource viewer screen, which provides a way to inspect the running Talos machine state when using the video console is the only option (e.g. when the network is not working and talosctl cannot be used).

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VM Hot-Add Support

Talos now includes udev rules to support hot-adding of CPUs in virtualized environments.

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Talos Imager Enhancements

Talos imager now can run rootless. The flags --privileged and -v /dev:/dev are no longer required for docker run. Talos disk images are now reproducible. Building the same version of Talos multiple times will yield identical disk images. Note: VHD and VMDK (Azure and VMware) images are not currently reproducible due to limitations in the underlying image creation tools. Users verifying reproducible images should use raw images, verify checksums, and convert them to VHD/VMDK as needed.

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Image APIs Updated

Talos Linux provides new APIs to manage container images on the node: listing, pulling, importing and removing images. The new pull APIs provide pull progress notifications. The CLI commands talosctl image pull, talosctl image list and talosctl image remove have been updated to interact with the new APIs.

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Environment Configuration Document

A new EnvironmentConfig document has been introduced to allow users to specify environment variables for Talos components. It replaces and deprecates the previous method of setting environment variables via the .machine.env field. Multiple values for the same environment variable will replace previous values, with the last one taking precedence. To remove an environment variable, remove it from the EnvironmentConfig document and restart the node.

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Image Bundles

The talosctl images k8s-bundle command now accepts an optional version override argument. The talosctl images talos-bundle command now accepts optional --overlays and --extensions flags. If those are set to false, the command will not attempt to reach out to the container registry to fetch the latest versions and digests of the overlays and extensions.

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Component Updates

  • Linux: 6.18.19
  • containerd: 2.2.2
  • runc: 1.4.2
  • etcd: 3.6.9
  • CoreDNS: 1.14.2
  • Kubernetes: 1.36.0
  • CNI: 1.9.1
  • Flannel CNI plugin: v1.9.0-flannel1
  • Flannel: 0.28.2
  • LVM2: 2_03_38
  • systemd: 259.5
  • cryptsetup: 2.8.3
  • iptables: 1.8.12
  • musl: 1.2.6
Talos is built with Go 1.26.2.

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Contributors

  • Andrey Smirnov
  • Mateusz Urbanek
  • Noel Georgi
  • Orzelius
  • Mickaël Canévet
  • Dmitrii Sharshakov
  • Laura Brehm
  • Artem Chernyshev
  • Edward Sammut Alessi
  • Fritz Schaal
  • Max Makarov
  • Andreas Freund
  • Bryan Lee
  • Justin Garrison
  • Nico Berlee
  • Pranav Patil
  • Spencer Smith
  • Utku Ozdemir
  • Zadkiel AHARONIAN
  • Alexis La Goutte
  • Andras BALI
  • Andreas Lüdeke
  • Andrei Kvapil
  • Birger Johan Nordølum
  • Camillo Rossi
  • Christopher Puschmann
  • Daniil Kivenko
  • David Orman
  • Dmitrii Sharshakov
  • Dominik Pitz
  • Florian Ströger
  • Gregor Gruener
  • Jaakko Sirén
  • Jan Paul
  • Jean-Francois Roy
  • Joakim Nohlgård
  • Jonas Lammler
  • Kai Zhang
  • Kevin Tijssen
  • Lennard Klein
  • Matthew Sanabria
  • Michal Baumgartner
  • Olav Thoresen
  • Serge van Ginderachter
  • Skye Soss
  • Stanley Chan
  • Sébastien Masset
  • Tim Jones
  • arita
  • dataprolet
  • drew
  • eseiker
  • greenpsi
  • lmacka
  • pranav767
  • pythoner6