Incorrect OS detection: Alibaba Cloud Linux 3 (OpenAnolis) misidentified as EL9, causing SELinux RPM installation failure

[taihechen599]

Hello K3s team,

I'm reporting an issue with the install.sh script incorrectly identifying Alibaba Cloud Linux 3 (OpenAnolis Edition) as el9, which leads to failed installation of the k3s-selinux package due to incompatible RPM dependencies.

🔍 Environment
OS: Alibaba Cloud Linux release 3 (OpenAnolis Edition)
Kernel: 5.10.x or newer
Architecture: x86_64
K3s version: v1.28.15+k3s1 (but affects other versions too)
Installation method: curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -
📋 /etc/os-release content:
NAME="Alibaba Cloud Linux"
VERSION="3 (OpenAnolis Edition)"
ID="alinux"
ID_LIKE="rhel fedora"
VERSION_ID="3"
PLATFORM_ID="platform:al8"
PRETTY_NAME="Alibaba Cloud Linux 3 (OpenAnois Edition)"
ANSI_COLOR="0;31"
HOME_URL="https://www.aliyun.com/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://help.aliyun.com/"
Note: PLATFORM_ID="platform:al8" clearly indicates RHEL 8 compatibility, not EL9.

❌ Problem
The install script’s detect_rpm_os() or setup_selinux() logic appears to infer the OS version based on kernel/glibc version or other heuristics, and mistakenly sets rpm_target=el9. As a result, it tries to download:

https://rpm.rancher.io/k3s-selinux/.../k3s-selinux-1.6-1.el9.noarch.rpm
But Alibaba Cloud Linux 3:

Is binary-compatible with RHEL 8 / CentOS 8
Ships with container-selinux-2:2.229.0-2.al8.noarch (epoch=2)
Cannot satisfy the container-selinux >= 3:2.191.0-1 requirement from EL9 packages (due to epoch mismatch)
This causes installation to fail with:

nothing provides container-selinux >= 3:2.191.0-1 needed by k3s-selinux-1.6-1.el9.noarch
✅ Workaround
We currently use:

INSTALL_K3S_SKIP_SELINUX_RPM=true
which works because the system’s built-in container-selinux is sufficient. However, this shouldn’t be necessary.

💡 Suggested Fix
In install.sh, when detecting Alibaba Cloud Linux:

If ID="alinux" and VERSION_ID="3", force rpm_target=el8
Or, more robustly, respect PLATFORM_ID: if it contains al8, treat as EL8
Example logic:

if [ "$ID" = "alinux" ] && [ "$VERSION_ID" = "3" ]; then
rpm_target="el8"
fi
🌍 Context
Alibaba Cloud Linux is widely used in China (millions of instances on Alibaba Cloud). Proper support will improve K3s adoption in this ecosystem.

Thank you for your great work!

[brandond]

Alibaba Cloud Linux 3 (OpenAnolis Edition)

We don't really have the resource to keep up with the ever-growning list of RHEL clones, nor do we really want to keep adding more and more cases to the install script. That said, PR welcome.