How to determine if your Amazon EC2 image has PV-GRUB bootloader?

If you would like to load a custom kernel in your Amazon linux instance, you will need an Amazon modified version of bootloader called PV-GRUB (1.04 or higher). Typically, you can determine that by running a set of AWS CLI commands

$aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-id <i-xxxxx> --profile <your profile>
{
    "Reservations": [
        {
            "OwnerId": "",
            "ReservationId": "",
            "Groups": [],
            "Instances": [
                {
                    "Monitoring": {
                        "State": "disabled"
                    },
                   ....
                   ....
                    "Architecture": "x86_64",
                    "KernelId": "aki-1eceaf77",
                    "IamInstanceProfile": {
                        "Id": "",
                        "Arn": ""
                    },
                    "RootDeviceName": "/dev/sda1",
                    "VirtualizationType": "paravirtual",
                    "Tags": [
                       ...
                    "AmiLaunchIndex": 0
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

$aws ec2 describe-images --image-ids <aki-xxxx> --profile <your profile>

{

    "Images": [

        {

            "VirtualizationType": "paravirtual",

            "Name": "pv-grub-hd0_1.04-i386.gz",

            "Hypervisor": "xen",

            "ImageOwnerAlias": "amazon",

            "ImageId": "aki-xxxx",

            "State": "available",

            "BlockDeviceMappings": [],

            "Architecture": "i386",

            "ImageLocation": "amzn-ami-us-east-1/pv-grub-hd0_1.04-i386.gz.manifest.xml",

            "RootDeviceType": "instance-store",

            "OwnerId": "",

            "Public": true,

            "ImageType": "kernel",

            "Description": "PV-GRUB release 1.04, 32-bit, configured for (hd0)/boot/grub/menu.lst"

        }

    ]

}