Howto update the kernel on ec2

[Sean Darcy]

On 09/10/2013 03:44 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> 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.)
>

Thanks for the quick response.

Is there any easy way to figure out what are aki kernels?

For instance, here are the kernels listed for ec2 region us-east-1:

us-east-1

aki-88aa75e1 pv-grub-hd0_1.03-x86_64.gz

aki-b6aa75df pv-grub-hd0_1.03-i386.gz

aki-b4aa75dd pv-grub-hd00_1.03-x86_64.gz

aki-b2aa75db pv-grub-hd00_1.03-i386.gz

How do you find out how these map to fedora kernels?

I guess as long as yum upgrade works, I really shouldn't care.

Again, thanks for making all this remarkably painless.

sean