Talos test cluster on Docker doesn't come up with ZFS storage

[dhs-rec]

Bug Report

Description

Wanted to try Talos on a local Docker setup which runs on a system with ZFS, using

talosctl cluster create docker --workers 2 --name TalosTest

but the cluster doesn't come up (see Logs below).

Logs

[talos] 2026/06/17 13:08:18 service[kubelet](Running): Started task kubelet (PID 380) for container kubelet
[talos] 2026/06/17 13:08:18 service[kubelet](Waiting): Error running Containerd(kubelet), going to restart forever: task "kubelet" failed: exit code 1 (last log "{\"ts\":1781701698604.1826,\"logger\":\"Memory Manager state checkpoint\",\"caller\":\"state/state_mem.go:112\",\"msg\":\"Updated machine memory state\",\"v\":0}\n{\"ts\":1781701698604.188,\"caller\":\"memorymanager/policy_none.go:44\",\"msg\":\"Start\",\"v\":0}\n{\"ts\":1781701698604.2195,\"caller\":\"kubelet/kubelet.go:1821\",\"msg\":\"Failed to start ContainerManager\",\"err\":\"failed to get rootfs info: cannot find filesystem info for device \\\"tank/srv/docker\\\"\"}")

This happens on both, control plane and worker nodes.

If I change the Docker configuration to use overlay2 on a different filesystem, everything works as expected.

Environment

• Talos version: 1.13.4
• Kubernetes version: v1.36.2 (but not relevant here)
• Platform: Debian 13 with ZFS

[smira]

You might need to mount something else (?) or change mount propagation for the kubelet inside the container to see correctly your ZFS volumes.

This is not a Talos issue on its own, but rather a kubelet is missing something to start up in your setup.

There's a --mount flag to the command which follows regular docker create mount syntax.

We'd be curious to here what is missing.

[dhs-rec]

Don't know. OTOH, a minikube setup works ootb on this system. Didn't try kind, though...