By default, Talos will run DHCP client on all interfaces which have a link, and that might be enough for most of the cases. If some advanced network configuration is required, it can be done via the machine configuration file. But sometimes it is required to apply network configuration even before the machine configuration can be fetched from the network.

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Kernel Command Line

Talos supports some kernel command line parameters to configure network before the machine configuration is fetched.
Note: Kernel command line parameters are not persisted after Talos installation, so proper network configuration should be done via the machine configuration.
Address, default gateway and DNS servers can be configured via ip= kernel command line parameter: 
ip=172.20.0.2::172.20.0.1:255.255.255.0::eth0.100:::::
Bonding can be configured via bond= kernel command line parameter: 
bond=bond0:eth0,eth1:balance-rr
VLANs can be configured via vlan= kernel command line parameter: 
vlan=eth0.100:eth0
See kernel parameters reference for more details.

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Platform Network Configuration

Some platforms (e.g. AWS, Google Cloud, etc.) have their own network configuration mechanisms, which can be used to perform the initial network configuration. There is no such mechanism for bare-metal platforms, so Talos provides a way to use platform network config on the metal platform to submit the initial network configuration. The platform network configuration is a YAML document which contains resource specifications for various network resources. For the metal platform, the interactive dashboard can be used to edit the platform network configuration, also the configuration can be created manually. The current value of the platform network configuration can be retrieved using the MetaKeys resource (key 0x0a): 
talosctl get meta 0x0a
The platform network configuration can be updated using the talosctl meta command for the running node: 
talosctl meta write 0x0a '{"externalIPs": ["1.2.3.4"]}'
talosctl meta delete 0x0a
The initial platform network configuration for the metal platform can be also included into the generated Talos image: The platform network configuration gets merged with other sources of network configuration, the details can be found in the network resources guide.

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nocloud Network Configuration

Some bare-metal providers provide a way to configure network via the nocloud data source. Talos Linux can automatically pick up this configuration when nocloud image is used.