Orange Pi 5

Installing Talos on Orange Pi 5 using raw disk image.

Prerequisites

Before you start:

Boot options

You can boot Talos from:

  1. booting from SD card
  2. booting from a USB or NVMe (requires a spi image on the SPI flash)

Booting from SD card

Go to https://factory.talos.dev select Single Board Computers, select the version and select Orange Pi 5 from the options. Choose your desired extensions and fill in the kernel command line arguments if needed.

Download the disk image and decompress it:

curl -LO https://factory.talos.dev/image/[uuid]/v1.9.2/metal-arm64.raw.xz
xz -d metal-arm64.raw.xz

Flash the Image

The image can be flashed using Etcher on Windows, macOS, or Linux or using dd on Linux:

# Replace /dev/<device> with the destination device
# You can find the device with `lsblk` or `fdisk -l`
sudo dd if=metal-arm64.raw of=/dev/<device> bs=1M status=progress && sync

Proceed by following the getting started guide for further steps on how to configure Talos.

Booting from USB or NVMe

Requirements

  • An SD card to boot the Orange Pi 5 board from in order to flash the SPI flash.

Go to https://factory.talos.dev select Single Board Computers, select the version and select Orange Pi 5 from the options. Choose your desired extensions and fill in the kernel command line arguments if needed.

You should also add the spi_boot: true overlay extra option in order to remove u-boot from the final image, as the bootloader will be flashed to the SPI flash.

Download the disk image and decompress it:

curl -LO https://factory.talos.dev/image/[uuid]/v1.9.2/metal-arm64.raw.xz
xz -d metal-arm64.raw.xz

Steps

  1. Make sure to install the NVMe or USB drive in the Orange Pi 5 board.

  2. Boot the Orange Pi 5 board from the SD card:

    • Flash the Orange Pi 5 variant of Ubuntu to an SD card.
    • Insert the SD card into the Orange Pi 5 board.
    • Boot into the Ubuntu image.
    • Download crane CLI on the Ubuntu image.
  3. From the Ubuntu image, find the latest sbc-rockchip overlay, download and extract the u-boot SPI image:

    • Find the latest release tag of the sbc-rockchip repo.

    • Download and extract the u-boot SPI image:

      crane --platform=linux/arm64 export ghcr.io/siderolabs/sbc-rockchip:<releasetag> | tar x --strip-components=4 artifacts/arm64/u-boot/orangepi-5/u-boot-rockchip-spi.bin
      
  4. Flash the SPI flash with the u-boot SPI image:

    devicesize=$(blockdev --getsz /dev/mtdblock0)
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mtdblock0 bs=1M count=$devicesize status=progress && sync
    dd if=u-boot-rockchip-spi.bin of=/dev/mtdblock0 bs=1M status=progress && sync
    
  5. Flash the Talos raw image to the NVMe or USB drive:

    sudo dd if=metal-arm64.raw of=/dev/<device> bs=1M status=progress && sync
    
  6. Shutdown the Orange Pi 5 board and remove the SD card.

On the next boot, Talos will now boot from the NVMe/USB and enter maintenance mode.

Proceed by following the getting started guide for further steps on how to configure Talos.

Troubleshooting

Serial console

If you experience any issues you can check the serial console. Follow the official guideline (Section 2.18 — “How to use the debugging serial port”) on how to connect a serial adapter.