IncusOS doesn't boot and isn't clear why not

IncusOS
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Screenshot - Monosnap

What does “currently unsupported operating mode” mean?

I enabled secure boot, created a USB .img using the “IncusOS Image Downloader” ( IncusOS image downloader ), booted it up, it auto installed, removed the USB drive, and this is what I get.

General points of feedback as a seasoned Linux sysadmin:

  • The OS is extremely different in how it’s installed and managed compared to any other Linux distro. This makes it difficult to “do the least surprising thing” in a way that users with familiarity with Debian/Ubuntu, LXD, Proxmox, etc. can understand.
  • Solving problems with the OS is frustrated by the fact that it is not discoverable: it doesn’t show or tell me how I can break into a shell to run diagnostics, get more verbose logs, or try to solve problems; and ways that I know to debug any other Linux system (pressing ESC, function keys, boot up a rescue mode from GRUB, etc.) don’t seem to work.
  • Being forced to pre-configure the image down to the specific NVMe drive ID, rather than using some sort of graphical or at least CLI based installer, is not very user friendly, as it requires multiple rounds of trial and error (I realized earlier that I typoed the NVMe drive ID and had to re-download an entire new image).

I realize this is early days for this software but LXC/LXD and the Debian base are mature technologies that can be leveraged, and I expected a smoother experience from the get-go, or at least the ability to get my hands dirty and understand and solve problems if things don’t go as expected. Instead, at the moment I’m completely stuck, despite years of experience operating various large-scale hypervisors and container managers on-prem and in the cloud.

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mode=unsafe and the unsupported mode suggest something is off with the SecureBoot configuration on this system.

It seems to have found Secure Boot keys but not the ones that should be present, yet the system booted which shouldn’t be possible with Secure Boot enabled.

This suggests something wonky with the Secure Boot config on this system, can you triple check that the KEK is loaded as well as the two DB entries and that Secure Boot is enabled and in enforced mode? Those settings tend to vary quite widely between platforms unfortunately :frowning: