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Prerequisites

You will need
  • talosctl
  • an SD card or an eMMC or USB drive or an nVME drive
Download the latest talosctl.

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Download the Image

The default schematic id for “vanilla” RockPi 4 is 25d2690bb48685de5939edd6dee83a0e09591311e64ad03c550de00f8a521f51. Refer to the Image Factory documentation for more information. Download the image and decompress it:

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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-arm64.raw 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)

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Booting from SD card or eMMC

Insert the SD card into the board, turn it on and proceed to bootstrapping the node.

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Booting from USB or nVME

This requires the user to flash the RockPi SPI flash with u-boot. Follow the Radxa docs on Install on M.2 NVME SSD After these above steps, Talos will boot from the nVME/USB and enter maintenance mode. Proceed to bootstrapping the node.

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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.

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Retrieve the kubeconfig

Retrieve the admin kubeconfig by running: 
talosctl kubeconfig

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Upgrading

For example, to upgrade to the latest version of Talos, you can run: