Introduction

Amazon EC2 now allows developers to use kernels other than the default Amazon EC2 kernels with their instances.
 

An Amazon Kernel Image (AKI) is similar to an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). The latter is prefixed with “ami-“while the former is prefixed with “aki-“. In addition, Amazon EC2 supports Amazon RAM disk Images (ARI) which might be required by kernels and are prefixed with “ari-“.
 

As of this release, anyone can use alternative kernels or RAM disks with their AMIs, but the ability to create and publish kernels and ramdisks is restricted to Amazon EC2 and selected vendors.

Prerequisites
 

Before you begin, make sure you are using the right versions of our WSDL, API Tools, and API:

• WSDL and API version: 2008-02-01 or later
• API Tools: 1.3-19403 2008-02-01

Note: You can check version information using the ec2ver command.

Finding Available Kernel Images (AKIs) and RAM disks(ARIs)
 

We'll use the getting started image, and launch it with an alternative public kernel. Finding the AMI ID for this image is described in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Getting Started Guide. At the time of writing, it is ami-2bb65342.
 

Finding an appropriate kernel is very similar.

ec2-describe-images -o self -o amazon 
  IMAGE    ami-25b6534c     ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache-mysql.manifest.xml        amazon   available       public          i386    machine
  IMAGE    ami-23b6534a     ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache.manifest.xml      amazon   available   public              i386    machine
  IMAGE    ami-20b65349     ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-base.manifest.xml        amazon   available   public              i386    machine
  IMAGE    ami-22b6534b     ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-mysql.manifest.xml       amazon   available   public              i386    machine
  IMAGE    ami-36ff1a5f     ec2-public-images/fedora-core6-base-x86_64.manifest.xml amazon  available    public              x86_64  machine
  IMAGE    ami-2bb65342     ec2-public-images/getting-started.manifest.xml  amazon   available       public          i386    machine
  IMAGE    aki-9b00e5f2     ec2-public-images/vmlinuz-2.6.18-xenU-ec2-v1.0.i386.aki.manifest.xml    amazon   available       private         i386     kernel
  IMAGE    aki-9800e5f1     ec2-public-images/vmlinuz-2.6.18-xenU-ec2-v1.0.x86_64.aki.manifest.xml  amazon   available       private         x86_64   kernel