Migrating to pv-grub kernels for kernel upgrades

After the release of the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS images that use the pv-grub kernel, there were some questions on what to do if you're running from an older AMI and want to take advantage of what pv-grub offers.

Heres a short list of how you might be affected:

• If you are running an EBS root instance launched from or rebundled from an Official Ubuntu image of 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) released 20110201.1 or later, 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), Natty Narwhal, or later, then you do not need to do anything. You already are using pv-grub, and can simply apply software updates and reboot to get new kernel updates. You can stop reading now.
• If you are running an instance-store instance that is not using a pv-grub kernel, there is nothing you can do. There is simply no way to change the kernel of an instance store instance.
• If you are running an EBS-root based instance rebundled from a Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) or older, then there is currently no supported path to getting kernel upgrades. There were no officially released EBS-root based Ubuntu images of 9.10, and with Karmic's end of life coming in April, there is not likely to be support for this new feature.
• If you are running an EBS-root instance launched from or rebundled from an official Ubuntu release of 10.04, read on.

Updating a 10.04 based image basically entails 2 steps, setting up /boot/grub/menu.lst, and then modifying your instance to have a pv-grub kernel.

Step 1: installing grub-legacy-ec2.

If you launched or rebundled your instance from an Ubuntu 10.04 numbered 20101020 or earlier, you need to do this step. If you started from a release of 20101228 you can skip this step.

• Apply software updates.
  
  Depending on how out of date you are, this might take a while.
  
  
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

  
• Install grub-legacy-ec2
  
  

  The 'grub-legacy-ec2' package is what the images use to manage /boot/grub/menu.lst. If you had used Ubuntu prior to the default selection of grub2, you will be familiar with how it works. grub-legacy-ec2 is basically just the menu.lst managing portion of the Ubuntu grub 0.97 package with some EC2 specifics thrown in.

  To get a functional /boot/grub/menu.lst, all you have to do is:

  
sudo apt-get install grub-legacy-ec2

  

Step 2: modifying the instance to use pv-grub kernels

Now, your images should have a functional /boot/grub/menu.lst, and grub-legacy-ec2 should be properly installed such that future kernels will get automatically added and selected on reboot. However, you have to change your instance to boot using pv-grub rather than the old kernel aki that you originally started with.

• Shut down the instance
  
  The best way to do this is probably to just issue '/sbin/poweroff' inside the instance. Alternatively, you could use the ec2 api tools, or do so from the AWS console.
  
% sudo /sbin/poweroff

  
• Modify the instance's kernel to be a pv-grub kernel
  
  Once the instance is moved to "stopped" state, you can modify its kernel to be a pv-grub kernel. The kernel you select depends on the arch and region. See the table below for selecting which you should use:
  

  region	arch	aki id
  ap-southeast-1	x86_64	aki-11d5aa43
  ap-southeast-1	i386	aki-13d5aa41
  eu-west-1	x86_64	aki-4feec43b
  eu-west-1	i386	aki-4deec439
  us-east-1	x86_64	aki-427d952b
  us-east-1	i386	aki-407d9529
  us-west-1	x86_64	aki-9ba0f1de
  us-west-1	i386	aki-99a0f1dc

  
  Then, assuming you have $AKI represents the appropriate aki above, and $IID represents your instance id, and $REGION represents your region, you can update the instance and then start it with:
  
$ ec2-modify-instance-attribute --region ${REGION} --kernel ${AKI} ${IID}
$ ec2-start-instances --region ${REGION} ${IID}

  

Your instance will start with a new hostname/IP address, so get that out of describe-instances and ssh to your instance. You can check that it has worked by looking at /proc/cmdline. Your kernel command line should look something like this:


$ cat /proc/cmdline
root=UUID=7233f657-c156-48fe-8d60-31ae6400d0cf ro console=hvc0


In the future, your instance will now behave much more like a "normal server". If you apply software updates (apt-get dist-upgrade) and reboot, you'll boot into a fresh new kernel.

Getting ephemeral devices on EBS images

When you launch an instance in EC2, be it EBS root or instance-store, you are "entitled" to some amount of ephemeral storage. Ephemeral storage is basically just extra local disk that lives in the host machine where your instance will run. How much instance-store disk you are entitled to is described with the instance size descriptions.

The described amount of ephemeral storage is allocated to all instance-store instances. However, at register time of EBS-root instances the default "block-device-mapping" is set. Because an EBS-root AMI may be run with different instance-types, it is impossible to set the correct mapping for all scenarios. For the Ubuntu images, the default mapping only includes ephemeral0, which is present in all but t1.micro sizes.

So, if you want to "get all that you're paying for", you'll have to launch instances with different '--block-device-mapping' arguments to ec2-run-instances (or euca-run-instances). I've written a little utility named bdmapping to make that easier, and hold the knowledge.

You can use it to show the mappings for a given instance type:


$ ./bdmapping
--block-device-mapping=sdb=ephemeral0 --block-device-mapping=sdc=ephemeral1


Or, use it with command substitution when you launch an instance:

$ ec2-run-instances $(bdmapping -c m1.xlarge) --key mykey ami-c692ec94
#
# the above is the same as running:
# ec2-run-instances --block-device-mapping=sdb=ephemeral0 \
# --block-device-mapping=sdc=ephemeral1 --instance-type=m1.large \
# --key mykey ami-c692ec94


You can view or download 'bdmapping' at https://gist.github.com/809587

New Ubuntu 10.04 LTS images with pv-grub support

Yesterday I announced the availability of updated Ubuntu images on EC2 for 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx).

This post is mainly to mirror that one to a possibly wider audience, but also to go into more detail on the key change in these images:

You can now upgrade the kernel inside your 10.04 based EC2 image by running 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade && reboot!

Now, for a little more detail on that.

Around the time that 10.04 released, or shortly there after, Amazon released a new feature of EC2 as "Use Your Own Kernel with Amazon EC2". What this really meant was that there were now "kernels" on EC2 that were really versions of grub. By selecting this kernel, and providing a /boot/grub/menu.lst inside your image, the instance would be in control of the kernel booted. Previously, the loading of a kernel was done by the xen hypervisor, and could not be changed at all for a instance-store image, and only non-trivially for an EBS-root instance

Yes, you read that right, midway through the year of 2010 you were able to change the kernel that you were running in an EC2 instance with a software update and a reboot.

We took advantage of this support in our 10.10 images, but for many people, only LTS (Long Term Support) releases are interesting. So, to satisfy those people, we've brought the function into our 10.04 images.

If you're using our images, or have rebundled an image starting from them, I *strongly* suggest updating to the 20110201.1 images or anything later. You'll want to do that because

• You can receive kernel upgrades as normal software upgrades to your running instance.
• This is by far the most supportable route for upgrade from 10.04 to our next LTS (12.04). If your instance is not using the pv-grub kernel, and you want to upgrade to a newer release, you will have to upgrade, shutdown the instance, modify the associated kernel, and start up the instance. That is both more painful, and will result in larger downtime.
  

So, in short, grab our new images!