Kubeadm with containerd cannot use locally loaded images

To manually pull the images execute the following:

kubeadm config images list
kubeadm config images pull

There is also a section for running kubeadm without an internet connection in the Kubernetes docs.

It turned out that I had to load images to the k8s.io namespace of the containerd so that Kubernetes can recognize them. I was importing the images to the wrong namespace (default).

ctr -n k8s.io images import xxx.tar
...

After loading all the images that Kubernetes needs, kubeadm init worked well without executing
kubeadm config images pull. The images that Kubernetes can use are shown in
ctr -n k8s.io images ls or crictl images.

# crictl images
IMAGE                                                          TAG                 IMAGE ID            SIZE
k8s.gcr.io/coredns/coredns                                     v1.8.4              8d147537fb7d1       47.7MB
k8s.gcr.io/etcd                                                3.5.0-0             0048118155842       296MB
k8s.gcr.io/kube-apiserver                                      v1.22.1             f30469a2491a5       130MB
k8s.gcr.io/kube-controller-manager                             v1.22.1             6e002eb89a881       123MB
k8s.gcr.io/kube-proxy                                          v1.22.1             36c4ebbc9d979       105MB
k8s.gcr.io/kube-scheduler                                      v1.22.1             aca5ededae9c8       53.9MB
k8s.gcr.io/pause                                               3.5                 ed210e3e4a5ba       686kB