Radxa ROCK PI 4C

Installing Talos on Radxa ROCK PI 4c SBC using raw disk image.

Prerequisites

You will need

talosctl
an SD card or an eMMC or USB drive or an nVME drive

Download the latest talosctl.

curl -Lo /usr/local/bin/talosctl https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/releases/download/v1.7.0/talosctl-$(uname -s | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]")-amd64
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/talosctl

Download the Image

The default schematic id for “vanilla” RockPi 4c is 08e72e242b71f42c9db5bed80e8255b2e0d442a372bc09055b79537d9e3ce191. Refer to the Image Factory documentation for more information.

Download the image and decompress it:

curl -LO https://factory.talos.dev/image/08e72e242b71f42c9db5bed80e8255b2e0d442a372bc09055b79537d9e3ce191/v1.7.0/metal-arm64.raw.xz
xz -d metal-arm64.raw.xz

Writing the Image

The path to your SD card/eMMC/USB/nVME can be found using fdisk on Linux or diskutil on macOS. In this example, we will assume /dev/mmcblk0.

Now dd the image to your SD card:

sudo dd if=metal-arm64.raw of=/dev/mmcblk0 conv=fsync bs=4M

The user has two options to proceed:

booting from a SD card or eMMC
booting from a USB or nVME (requires the RockPi board to have the SPI flash)

Booting from SD card or eMMC

Insert the SD card into the board, turn it on and proceed to bootstrapping the node.

Booting from USB or nVME

This requires the user to flash the RockPi SPI flash with u-boot.

Follow the Radxa docs on Install on M.2 NVME SSD

After these above steps, Talos will boot from the nVME/USB and enter maintenance mode. Proceed to bootstrapping the node.

Bootstrapping the Node

Wait for the console to show you the instructions for bootstrapping the node. Following the instructions in the console output to connect to the interactive installer:

talosctl apply-config --insecure --mode=interactive --nodes <node IP or DNS name>

Once the interactive installation is applied, the cluster will form and you can then use kubectl.

Retrieve the `kubeconfig`

Retrieve the admin kubeconfig by running:

talosctl kubeconfig

Upgrading

For example, to upgrade to the latest version of Talos, you can run:

talosctl -n <node IP or DNS name> upgrade --image=factory.talos.dev/installer/08e72e242b71f42c9db5bed80e8255b2e0d442a372bc09055b79537d9e3ce191:v1.7.0