Howto update the kernel on ec2

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 03:25:36PM -0400, Sean Darcy wrote:
> But...when you do it you get to a dialog where you can choose the
> kernel to use. The drop down list includes default and a number of
> AKI's (Amazon Kernel Images??) . How do you find out what the AKI's
> refer to in Fedora speak, i.e.  kernel-3.10.10-100.fc18.x86_64 ?? I
> googled some of the aki's , but found nothing.


> we should use an hd0 ( and not hd00 ) aki, correct?

Right. Use the pv-grub AKI for an unpartitioned image (the hd0 ones). See
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/UserProvidedkernels.html#AmazonKernelImageIDs
for more.

This will then use /boot/grub/menu.lst (which symlinks to
/boot/grub/grub.conf; implementation detail) to boot a kernel on the image.
(Grub isn't actually used on the images, just the config file. Also you may
notice that the images contain extlinux; that's because they're identical to
the downloadable qcow2 images meant to boot in openstack or other cloud
providers without pv-grub).


> But now I have an F19 instance running. Will I need to do some magic
> to upgrade the kernel, or is yum upgrade sufficient?

Yum upgrade and reboot. We've endeavored to make the existing kernel magic
just work. Of course, there's a tiny chance that something will go horribly
wrong -- if it does, please report. (As a matter of course, make sure you're
not storing anything irreplaceable on a cloud instance anyway.)

-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>