The release of AWS share EBS snapshots
How to Boot EC2 Instances from EBS
Cool Things You can do with Shared EBS
Hidden Dangers in Creating Public EBS Snapshots on EC2
Making an AMI use EBS to load the system files
Using the references above I tried to test Bootable EBS volumes, I’ve made some experiments (duh) to test bootable EBS volumes base on Alestic AMIs:
Ubuntu Hardy(ami-e546a78c)
Debian Lenny AMI(ami-ff46a796)
Note that both of these AMI’s are using the same AKI (aki-a71cf9ce) and ARI (ari-a51cf9cc). Therefore the two boot EBS volumes created has this properties. To create the Lenny and Hardy bootable EBS volumes, I simply follow Shlomo’s How to Boot EC2 Instances from EBS tutorial.
The first boot AMI is based on Alestic Ubuntu Hardy(ami-e546a78c) where the device used was set to /dev/sdj instead of /dev/sdp in Shlomo’s tutorial.
It was able to boot and I can successfully connect using SSH to these two instances without problems.
Here are the output of using two different EBS volumes:
Debian Lenny bootable EBS Output using boot AMI based on Alestic Hardy(ami-e546a78c)
EXT3 FS on sda1, internal journal Making pivot_root device node /new-root-dev Attempting to mount pivot_root volume on /new-root-dev 1 scsi_mod: no version for "struct_module" found: kernel tainted. SCSI subsystem initialized register_blkdev: cannot get major 8 for sd mount: /new-root-dev is not a valid block device 2 mount: /new-root-dev is not a valid block device 3 mount: /new-root-dev is not a valid block device 4 mount: /new-root-dev is not a valid block device 5 mount: /new-root-dev is not a valid block device 6 mount: /new-root-dev is not a valid block device 7 mount: /new-root-dev is not a valid block device 8 mount: /new-root-dev is not a valid block device 9 mount: /new-root-dev is not a valid block device 10 mount: /new-root-dev is not a valid block device sdj: unknown partition table 11 kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Mounted pivot_root volume. Mount failed for selinuxfs on /selinux: No such file or directory INIT: version 2.86 booting /proc is empty (not mounted ?) hostname: the specified hostname is invalid Starting the hotplug events dispatcher: udevd. Synthesizing the initial hotplug events...done. Waiting for /dev to be fully populated...input: PC Speaker as /class/input/input1 done.