What is the expected recovery behavior for a failed Talos OS image replacement?

Atomic Upgrade Failures

Talos OS utilizes the talosctl upgrade command to atomically replace the node's OS image. Because the upgrade process does not support pausing or resuming mid-operation, a failure during the image replacement—such as a network interruption or image corruption—can leave a node in an inconsistent state.

Recovery Constraints

While the system includes a recovery partition with a known-good image, this partition is not automatically triggered upon a failed upgrade attempt. Current behavior requires an administrator to manually initiate a reboot into recovery mode and re-apply the cluster configuration to restore stability.

Given that automatic rollback mechanisms are not currently implemented in the OS, there is uncertainty regarding the safest path to restoration without risking configuration drift or data loss on persistent volumes.

• Does the system provide a way to detect a failed image replacement automatically before the node attempts to boot?
• Which manual intervention is recommended to ensure a node returns to its previous stable version without a full factory reset?