Raspberry Pi 4 Model B

Video Walkthrough

To see a live demo of this writeup, see the video below:

Prerequisites

You will need

• talosctl
• an SD card

Download the latest alpha talosctl.

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

Updating the EEPROM

At least version v2020.09.03-138a1 of the bootloader (rpi-eeprom) is required. To update the bootloader we will need an SD card. Insert the SD card into your computer and run the following: The path to your SD card can be found using fdisk on Linux or diskutil on Mac OS. In this example we will assume /dev/mmcblk0.

curl -LO https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/releases/download/v2020.09.03-138a1/rpi-boot-eeprom-recovery-2020-09-03-vl805-000138a1.zip
sudo mkfs.fat -I /dev/mmcblk0
sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0 /mnt
sudo bsdtar rpi-boot-eeprom-recovery-2020-09-03-vl805-000138a1.zip -C /mnt

Remove the SD card from your local machine and insert it into the Raspberry Pi. Power the Raspberry Pi on, and wait at least 10 seconds. If successful, the green LED light will blink rapidly (forever), otherwise an error pattern will be displayed. If an HDMI display is attached then the screen will display green for success or red if a failure occurs. Power off the Raspberry Pi and remove the SD card from it.

Note: Updating the bootloader only needs to be done once.

Download the Image

Download the image and decompress it:

curl -LO https://github.com/talos-systems/talos/releases/latest/download/metal-rpi_4-arm64.img.xz
xz -d metal-rpi_4-arm64.img.xz

Writing the Image

Now dd the image to your SD card:

sudo dd if=metal-rpi_4-arm64.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 conv=fsync bs=4M

Bootstrapping the Node

Insert the SD card to your board, turn it on and 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 --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

Troubleshooting

The following table can be used to troubleshoot booting issues: