Today Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) announced two new Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). We now provide new variants of the Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) GPU and Inferentia AMIs that have an updated Linux kernel (5.10). The ECS-optimized GPU AMI contains pre-configured Nvidia kernel drivers, the Docker GPU runtime, and the default version of CUDA. The ECS Optimized Inferentia AMI comes pre-baked with all the necessary AWS Neuron packages for running on Inferentia EC2 instances. Kernel 5.10 brings performance improvements and security features for processor architectures powering the latest generations of Amazon EC2 instances.

We recommend you use the ECS-Optimized AL2 Kernel Version 5.10 GPU and INF AMIs when launching new GPU and Inferentia instances to benefit from new features and performance improvements. Kernel version 5.10 will continue to be supported until the end of life date for Amazon Linux 2 (06/2025).