The ODROID-C2 has an Amlogic S905, Quad Core Cortex™-A53 (ARMv8 64-bit) processor with Triple Core Mali-450 GPU and 2GB DDR3 (32-bit / 912Mhz) of RAM. Kali Linux can run from either an external microSD card, or an eMMC module.

By default, the Kali Linux ODROID-C2 image contains the kali-linux-default metapackage similar to most other platforms. If you wish to install extra tools please refer to our metapackages page.

Kali does not provide pre-built images for download, but you can still generate one by cloning the Kali-ARM Build-Scripts repository on GitLab, and follow the README.md file’s instructions. The script to use is odroid-c2.sh.

Once the build script finishes running, you will have an “img.xz” file in the images directory where you ran the script from. At that point, the instructions are the same as if you had downloaded a pre-built image.

The easiest way to generate these images is from within a pre-existing Kali Linux environment.

To install Kali on your ODROID-C2, follow these instructions:

1. Get a fast microSD card with at least 16GB capacity. Class 10 cards are highly recommended.
2. Use the dd utility to image this file to your microSD card (same process as making a Kali USB.

In our example, we assume the storage device is located at /dev/sdX. Do not simply copy these value, change this to the correct drive path.

$ xzcat images/kali-linux-2024.2-odroid-c2-arm64.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progres

This process can take a while, depending on your PC, your microSD card speed, and the size of the Kali Linux image.

Once the dd operation is complete, boot up the ODROID-C2 with the microSD card plugged in.

The same image file can be used for either eMMC or microSD card.

You should be able to log in to Kali.

The bootloader on the ODROID-C2 is u-boot, and in order to make changes to the kernel command line, the file to edit is /etc/default/u-boot and the option is U_BOOT_PARAMETERS. If you make any modifications to this file, you will want to then run u-boot-update.

USB on the ODROID-C2 will autosuspend if there is nothing plugged in to a USB port at boot time, so one possible change you might want to add is usbcore.autosuspend=-1 if you want to plug in a USB device after the ODROID-C2 has booted.

If both a microSD card and an eMMC are plugged in, the ODROID-C2 will attempt to boot from the microSD card first.