Unsuccessful ISO builds of Talos (grub issues)

[nausicaea]

Hi there! I'm looking for support with CI builds of siderolabs/talos: When I attempt to build a Metal ISO (amd64), I keep hitting a wall as grub-mkrescue attempts to find /usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2 which is not present in the GRUB2 container image from siderolabs/pkgs. I think I'm missing something obvious or that I have a faulty CI setup, since I don't find any related issues on your Github repos. I am currently working with Talos 1.12.11.

Steps I already performed:

• Look at the contents of ghcr.io/siderolabs/grub:* images to find GRUB2 font files. None are present in any of the images I looked at.
• Attempt to modify grub/pkg.yaml to build the GRUB2 unicode font. I was unable to build FreeType.
• Attempt to modify pkg/imager/iso/grub.go and pkg/imager/iso/hybrid.go to explicitly request --fonts=ascii or no font --fonts=. In both cases, the command make initramfs kernel installer-base imager installer iso in my CI workflow ignores those options to grub-mkrescue and attempts to load unicode.pf2 anyway.

Let me know how I can best provide the required information.

[smira]

We have pipelines in the CI which build ISOs for every job, so you must be doing something wrong.

If you need help, you have to provide at least the exact invocation of the imager that is failing.

[smira]

We really can't debug your CI pipelines, if you have a single line reproducer as a shell command which fails and uses upstream Talos packages, we can help.

If you're building Talos yourself, the problem is within your pipeline(s).

[nausicaea]

Ok thanks. I'll try to give you a single reproducer with your upstream images and then get back to you.

[nausicaea]

Alright, I have a minimal reproduction of the issue. The operative part of the profile is bootloader: grub. If I set this to bootloader: dual-boot or bootloader: sd-boot, all runs well and I get the ISO.

#!/bin/sh

set -e

TEMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)
cd "$TEMPDIR" || exit

# Build the ISO
cat <<'EOF' | docker run --rm -i -v "$(pwd)/_out:/out" ghcr.io/siderolabs/imager:v1.12.11 -
arch: amd64
platform: metal
secureboot: false
version: v1.12.11
input:
  kernel:
    path: /usr/install/amd64/vmlinuz
  initramfs:
    path: /usr/install/amd64/initramfs.xz
  sdStub:
    path: /usr/install/amd64/systemd-stub.efi
  sdBoot:
    path: /usr/install/amd64/systemd-boot.efi
  baseInstaller:
    imageRef: ghcr.io/siderolabs/installer-base:v1.12.11
output:
  kind: iso
  isoOptions:
    sdBootEnrollKeys: if-safe
    bootloader: grub
  outFormat: raw
EOF

[smira]

this looks like a bug to me, it works via the Image Factory though.

We'll get it fixed, but Image Factory is the easiest way to get it going for now

[nausicaea]

Unfortunately, I believe I have to build my own because one of my machines requires a custom kernel. But thanks for confirming that it's a bug! Can you post the issue or PR for the bug here, please? So I can follow its development.

[smira]

that is a tricky one to address properly, but you can go with dual-boot for now (if you really want BIOS), GRUB is a wrong choice as it actually generates EFI/BIOS one which handles GRUB only, while Talos prefers systemd-boot for UEFI.

[nausicaea]

Alright, I'll try that. Thanks for the tip!