How is BOOT partition size supposed to be increased on long-lived nodes upgraded since very early Talos versions?

[franciscomfcmaia]

Hi Talos team,

I’m trying to understand what the intended and supported path is for increasing the BOOT partition size on nodes that have been continuously upgraded from very early Talos releases.

Background

I have worker nodes that were originally installed on Talos v0.14.1 and have been upgraded in-place over time through many releases to current versions.

These nodes now fail upgrades with errors like:

failed to install bootloader: write /boot/B/initramfs.xz: no space left on device

On inspection, the BOOT partition is:

BOOT = 1.0 GB (xfs)

which appears to be insufficient for newer kernels/initramfs/system extensions and the A/B upgrade mechanism.

New installations seem to create a larger BOOT partition, so this looks like a “long-lived node” problem rather than a misconfiguration.

What I’ve looked for

I’ve checked:

• Disk layout documentation
• VolumeConfig docs
• Discovered volumes / disk resources
• GitHub issues related to resizing filesystems

I understand that:

• VolumeConfig applies to EPHEMERAL / user volumes
• EFI / META / STATE are hardcoded
• BOOT is not exposed as a configurable or resizable volume

What I haven’t found is any documented or supported way to handle BOOT resizing for nodes that were installed before the larger BOOT size became the default.

The question

What is the expected upgrade path for operators who have been upgrading Talos since early versions (e.g. v0.14.x)?

Specifically:

• Is the only supported solution to reinstall the node to get a larger BOOT partition?
• If so, is this intentional and expected for long-lived clusters?
• Or is there (or will there be) a supported migration/resize mechanism for BOOT?

I want to make sure I’m not missing something obvious, and also to understand whether this is a known lifecycle limitation or an area where guidance could be improved.

Thanks for all the work on Talos — this question is mainly about expectations and operational guidance rather than a bug report.

[rothgar]

Thank you for using Talos for so long and for sharing the limitation you've encountered.

Unfortunately, the only way to get a larger BOOT partition is to wipe the drive and do a fresh installation. At this point we don't have any plans to resize the partition for the larger default size. Hopefully that doesn't cause too much disruption for you and you'll be able to get another 3+ years out of an installation.

[frezbo]

Resizing cannot be automated from talos side since a normal installation is a continuous layout, it's very easy to mess up in an automated way, we recommend a wipe-then-reinstall with same machine config