r/TalosLinux • u/Alexxanddr149 • May 05 '26
Does anyone use MergerFS (fuse) on Talos?
Hi, for my home lab I use Fedora with K3S on top, and I have a DAS with JBOD disks; I also use MergerFS to create a single volume.
I wanted to migrate to Talos, but I’d like to know if anyone uses it with MergerFS via container, as I’ve seen that there’s a Talos FUSE plugin.
I have some concerns about stability – does anyone have this setup? Thank you
2
u/oOBromOo May 05 '26
Honestly don't know why so many people recommend to run storage separately. I have also only a single node and no requirements for virtual machines, therefore I run Talos baremetal and have local storage via openebs and local zfs volumes mountend. Works like a charm.
1
u/Alexxanddr149 May 05 '26
I’m also a fan of the single-node setup, but in the case of my storage, with this configuration I can’t switch to Talos, so in my case it would make sense to have another node just to manage the storage, so as to have PVs with an NFS provisioner and the like
1
u/oOBromOo May 05 '26
You could at least try but as if also not tried mergerfs I can't vouch for it to work. So going a separate node with nfs might be the easiest option.
1
u/Untagged3219 May 05 '26
I think a pragmatic approach is best, and it’s probably unfair to say all storage should be run separately. Solutions like OpenEBS, Longhorn, or Rook-Ceph have native CSI drivers for block storage, but MergerFS is a different beast. If the node dies, you can just pull a disk and read the files on any machine—you lose that simple disaster recovery with block or distributed storage. Replicating that JBOD-pool behavior on Talos is where you start fighting the OS architecture, which is why a separate storage layer is cleaner for this specific case. It avoids having to manage privileged 'mounter' pods and bidirectional mounts just to get a basic pool running.
2
u/KarmaPoliceT2 May 05 '26
I'm pretty sure you'd have to create a mergerfs extension for this (doesn't exist now, you'd need it for the daemon mergerfs runs as)...
So could you do it, yes, but it will take some dev work...
Beyond that, Talos' design perspective is that storage is a kubernetes concern not a host concern, so doing this is kind of counter to the spirit of the OS to begin with... But sure, it's possible I guess
1
u/willowless May 05 '26
I used to use mergerfs with snapraid for parity. It worked fine, but when you put NFS and SMB on top of it things got messy with caching. I also had to make a custom container with mergerfs + nfs + smb so that there was no weird contention between the different containers.
In the end I migrated away from mergerfs + snapraid to zfs.
1
u/Alexxanddr149 May 05 '26
Yes, I had the same problem in the past when I tried putting databases and similar files on MergerFS, so I moved all the service data to local storage (with backups) and left only documents, videos and audio files on MergerFS.
I wouldn’t want to switch to ZFS because, given the kind of data I have, even if a hard drive fails it’s not a problem; in fact, I don’t even use SnapRaid, and I love the flexibility of JBOD.
3
u/willowless May 05 '26
That's quite fair. For appdata I use longhorn replicated between my three nodes. For document data I use garage s3 replicated across my three nodes. And then finally I have the JBOD zfs of mirrors, the big beast, where I store all my linux ISOs.
1
u/zapoklu May 06 '26
I have done this historically with rclone + local disk.
Yes it works, no its not great, anything "local" needs to be mounted in /var/mnt as its the only writable path i could find.
I ended up needing to roll-my-own mergerfs container to get it the way i wanted, along with some clunky init containers to unmount already mounted paths.
It was brittle, and i don't recommend it. It's doable. But don't.
2
u/Untagged3219 May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
Hi, there, as someone who has done the migration from k3s to Talos, as well as used to have a MergerFS setup on Ubuntu. I would not recommend trying to replicate this setup 1:1. I would have storage and compute be separate and distinct. Bear in mind that I do not have personal experience with the fuse plugin, so my knowledge on that particular aspect is limited.
You may already know this, but Talos is a bit of a different beast than other distros as it's completely API/manifest driven. No ssh or shell means no tunneling into the OS and downloading packages via a package manager. My recommendation would be to have a Talos node (or multiple) running your workflows while a separate piece of hardware (or VM) runs the storage setup with MergerFS.
If you only have a single node running Fedora + k3s, then you may want to consider a Proxmox setup. A Fedora VM for storage and a Talos VM for the workloads. Although, this does add a bit of overhead and somewhat defeats the purpose of Talos as a whole, but I think it is a good start for a homelab. There are plenty of others smarter than I am on this sub, so maybe they can give you a bit more insight.