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Radxa ROCK PI 4

Installing Talos on Radxa ROCK PI 4a/4b 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/v1.1.1/talosctl-$(uname -s | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]")-amd64
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/talosctl

Download the Image

Download the image and decompress it:

curl -LO https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/releases/download/v1.1.1/metal-rockpi_4-arm64.img.xz
xz -d metal-rockpi_4-arm64.img.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-rockpi_4-arm64.img 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.

This requires the user has access to crane CLI, a spare SD card and optionally access to the RockPi serial console.

  • Flash the Rock PI 4c variant of Debian to the SD card.
  • Boot into the debian image
  • Check that /dev/mtdblock0 exists otherwise the command will silently fail; e.g. lsblk.
  • Download u-boot image from talos u-boot:
mkdir _out
crane --platform=linux/arm64 export ghcr.io/siderolabs/u-boot:v1.1.0-alpha.0-19-g6691342 - | tar xf - --strip-components=1 -C _out rockpi_4/rkspi_loader.img
sudo dd if=rkspi_loader.img of=/dev/mtdblock0 bs=4K
  • Optionally, you can also write Talos image to the SSD drive right from your Rock PI board:
curl -LO https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/releases/download/v1.1.1/metal-rockpi_4-arm64.img.xz
xz -d metal-rockpi_4-arm64.img.xz
sudo dd if=metal-rockpi_4-arm64.img.xz of=/dev/nvme0n1
  • remove SD card and reboot.

After these 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
Last modified March 29, 2022: docs: reorganize documentation (fa57b5d92)