Podman 5.0 Unveiled

The Podman community has a lot to celebrate as the open source container engine hits another milestone: the release of Podman 5.0. From the very beginning, Podman has given developers a powerful tool for building, managing and running containers in Linux environments. With each release, users have gained powerful new features, improved security, and enhanced ease of use. Podman 5.0 is no different.

With this release, our efforts were focused on three primary objectives. First, we heavily rewrote the code for Podman machine. Podman machine includes a set of subcommands that manage Podman’s virtual machine, which is necessary for users to be able to run Podman on MacOS or Windows.

This was an important step forward for the project, and helps better enable our second objective for this release: the introduction of support for the Apple-native Hypervisor. We were able to do this for both Intel and Apple Silicon processors, enabling compatibility for developers using a broad variety of hardware. In addition to Apple-native Hupervisor, we have also moved to virtiofs for access to local files systems on the MacOS, which is a huge improvement over Plan 9 for file system access within the VM.

Our third objective was to take advantage of the major version release to introduce changes that are necessary for future releases, but make Podman behave differently than previous versions. For example, we are now able to list containers on a given network when inspecting that network. CNI networking is no longer enabled by default as well.  A more exhaustive list of changes can be found on the Podman 5 release notes.

In addition to achieving these objectives, Podman 5.0 introduces a number of new features and changes, including:

• podman machine reset, enabling users to reset their Podman machines quickly.
• Podman machines now include subscription manager and qemu-user-static
• Faster boot times for Podman machines.
• podman farm build, giving developers the ability to quickly build multi-platform images on remote machines.
• podman manifest support for Open Container Initiative (OCI) artifacts
• We have also changed the default rootless networking tool to pasta resulting in a more performant network stack.

While this is not meant to be a comprehensive list, we believe it highlights some of the best of what the community has accomplished and certainly captures the breadth of work that goes into each release.

Because Podman 5 is a major release, it will not be released on the current Fedora version.  But with Fedora 40 soon to be released, a fresh Podman experience awaits you.  

Congratulations to the team on this great milestone!