Manage device drivers for your EC2 instance

Device drivers are software components that communicate with the virtualized hardware for your Amazon EC2 instance. To prevent system errors, performance issues, and other unexpected behavior, it's important to keep your drivers up-to-date. That's especially true for drivers that can have a strong impact on system performance depending on your usage, such as networking, graphics, and storage device drivers. New driver releases can include defect fixes or introduce expanded functionality that you might want to take advantage of for instances that are currently running.

Network drivers

Linux distributions can incorporate networking features like Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) or Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) within the kernel. However, the timing may vary for implementation of kernel driver features within the different distributions.

ENA and EFA Linux kernel drivers are available from the Amazon Drivers GitHub repository. For more information and links to the available drivers, see Amazon Drivers on GitHub.

For more information about ENA drivers, see Enable enhanced networking with ENA on your EC2 instances. For more information about EFA drivers, see Getting started topics in the Elastic Fabric Adapter for AI/ML and HPC workloads on Amazon EC2 section of this guide.

To install or update networking drivers on Windows instances, see the following topics:

Graphics drivers

To install or update graphics drivers, see the following topics:

Storage device drivers

To install or update storage drivers, see the following topics: