Raspberry Pi Series

Talos disk image for the Raspberry Pi generic should in theory work for the boards supported by u-boot rpi_arm64_defconfig. This has only been officialy tested on the Raspberry Pi 4 and community tested on one variant of the Compute Module 4 using Super 6C boards. If you have tested this on other Raspberry Pi boards, please let us know.

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 talosctl.

curl -sL 'https://www.talos.dev/install' | bash

Updating the EEPROM

Use Raspberry Pi Imager to write an EEPROM update image to a spare SD card. Select Misc utility images under the Operating System tab.

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 to the port closest to the power/USB-C port, 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

The default schematic id for “vanilla” Raspberry Pi generic image is ee21ef4a5ef808a9b7484cc0dda0f25075021691c8c09a276591eedb638ea1f9.Refer to the Image Factory documentation for more information.

Download the image and decompress it:

curl -LO https://factory.talos.dev/image/ee21ef4a5ef808a9b7484cc0dda0f25075021691c8c09a276591eedb638ea1f9/v1.9.0/metal-arm64.raw.xz
xz -d metal-arm64.raw.xz

Writing the Image

Now dd the image to your SD card:

sudo dd if=metal-arm64.raw 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 --mode=interactive --nodes <node IP or DNS name>

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

Note: if you have an HDMI display attached and it shows only a rainbow splash, please use the other HDMI port, the one closest to the power/USB-C port.

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/ee21ef4a5ef808a9b7484cc0dda0f25075021691c8c09a276591eedb638ea1f9:v1.9.0

Troubleshooting

The following table can be used to troubleshoot booting issues: