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This page outlines the system requirements for running Talos Linux. Requirements are listed for both control plane and worker nodes, and are broadly similar to those of Kubernetes.

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Minimum requirements

The following are the minimum system requirements for running Talos Linux on control plane and worker nodes:
RoleMemoryCoresSystem Disk
Control Plane2 GiB210 GiB
Worker1 GiB110 GiB
For production or heavier workloads, the following specifications are recommended:
RoleMemoryCoresSystem Disk
Control Plane4 GiB4100 GiB
Worker2 GiB2100 GiB

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Storage requirements

While Talos Linux itself requires less than 100 MB of disk space, the EPHEMERAL partition is used to store pulled images, container working directories, and other runtime data — so a minimum of 10 GiB of total disk space is required, with 100 GiB recommended. During installation, Talos automatically manages disk partitioning, creating EFI, META, STATE, and EPHEMERAL partitions. The EPHEMERAL partition expands to fill all remaining space after the first three partitions. That space can either remain entirely with EPHEMERAL or be divided into additional user volumes, depending on your needs. See Disk Layout for details. For production environments, it is often more efficient to dedicate a smaller disk to the Talos installation and use separate disks for workload storage. Using a single large disk for both system and workloads is supported, but may not be optimal depending on your setup.

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CPU requirements

Talos images for amd64 require a CPU that supports the x86-64-v2 microarchitecture level. A CPU below that level halts at boot with:
This is most often seen on virtual machines whose CPU type defaults to an older or generic model, such as Proxmox’s kvm64 — see the Proxmox guide for the fix. To build Talos images for CPUs that do not meet this requirement, use the GOAMD64=v1 build option described in Building Custom Talos Images.