Posted On: Mar 6, 2023

You can now create a single AMI that can boot on both Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and Legacy BIOS.

In EC2, two variants of the boot mode software are supported: UEFI and Legacy BIOS. Previously, you could only create AMIs that work on either UEFI or Legacy BIOS. If you wanted to support both types of boot modes, you would need to create and maintain separate sets of AMIs. With this launch, you can now use the 'UEFI Preferred' boot mode which will boot your instance on UEFI if the Amazon EC2 instance type supports UEFI. If not, the instance will boot using Legacy BIOS.

This feature is available in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

For more information, refer to the UEFI Preferred documentation.