PV-GRUB

PV-GRUB has the following limitations:

To boot PV-GRUB, a GRUB menu.lst file must exist in the image; the most common location for this file is /boot/grub/menu.lst.

The following is an example of a menu.lst configuration file for booting an AMI with a PV-GRUB AKI. In this example, there are two kernel entries to choose from: Amazon Linux 2016.03 (the original kernel for this AMI), and Vanilla Linux 4.5 (a newer version of the Vanilla Linux kernel from https://www.kernel.org/). The Vanilla entry was copied from the original entry for this AMI, and the kernel and initrd paths were updated to the new locations. The default 0 parameter points the boot loader to the first entry it sees (in this case, the Vanilla entry), and the fallback 1 parameter points the bootloader to the next entry if there is a problem booting the first.

default 0
fallback 1
timeout 0
hiddenmenu

title Vanilla Linux 4.5
root (hd0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-4.5 root=LABEL=/ console=hvc0
initrd /boot/initrd.img-4.5

title Amazon Linux 2016.03 (4.4.5-15.26.amzn1.x86_64)
root (hd0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-4.4.5-15.26.amzn1.x86_64 root=LABEL=/ console=hvc0
initrd /boot/initramfs-4.4.5-15.26.amzn1.x86_64.img

You don't need to specify a fallback kernel in your menu.lst file, but we recommend that you have a fallback when you test a new kernel. PV-GRUB can fall back to another kernel in the event that the new kernel fails. Having a fallback kernel allows the instance to boot even if the new kernel isn't found.

PV-GRUB checks the following locations for menu.lst, using the first one it finds:

Note that PV-GRUB 1.03 and earlier only check one of the first two locations in this list.

PV-GRUB AKIs are available in all Amazon EC2 regions. There are AKIs for both 32-bit and 64-bit architecture types. Most modern AMIs use a PV-GRUB AKI by default.

We recommend that you always use the latest version of the PV-GRUB AKI, as not all versions of the PV-GRUB AKI are compatible with all instance types. Use the following describe-images command to get a list of the PV-GRUB AKIs for the current region:

$ aws ec2 describe-images --owners amazon --filters Name=name,Values=pv-grub-*.gz

Note that PV-GRUB is the only AKI available in the ap-southeast-2 region. You should verify that any AMI you want to copy to this region is using a version of PV-GRUB that is available in this region.

The following are the current AKI IDs for each region. Register new AMIs using an hd0 AKI.

We recommend that you always use the latest version of the PV-GRUB AKI, as not all versions of the PV-GRUB AKI are compatible with all instance types. Also, older versions of PV-GRUB are not available in all regions, so if you copy an AMI that uses an older version to a region that does not support that version, you will be unable to boot instances launched from that AMI until you update the kernel image. Use the following procedures to check your instance's version of PV-GRUB and update it if necessary.