Podman 6.1 is now available as the latest feature release of the popular daemonless container engine, introducing new commands for renaming volumes and restarting Podman-managed virtual machines, along with improvements to Quadlet, networking, Kubernetes integration, and Docker API compatibility.
One of the most useful additions is the new podman volume rename command, which allows users to rename existing Podman volumes without recreating them. However, volumes created through volume drivers cannot be renamed, nor can volumes currently in use by a container.
Podman Machine users get a new podman machine restart command that provides a straightforward way to restart virtual machines managed by podman machine, avoiding the need to stop and start them separately.
Elsewhere, podman network rm gains a new --ignore option that suppresses errors when removing a network that does not exist. Plus, podman manifest push now supports --retry and --retry-delay options, allowing failed image manifest pushes to be retried automatically.
On the quadlet side, .container units now support a new ImageVolume= key to control how image-defined volumes are handled. Several Quadlet bugs have been fixed too, including issues with template units, installation behavior, and a race condition that could corrupt systemd units.
Additionally, error reporting from the Quadlet generator has improved, with messages now written to standard error rather than only to the kernel message buffer.
For users working with Kubernetes-style configurations, podman generate kube can now translate container healthchecks into Kubernetes livenessProbe definitions.
Regarding networking, the Pesto rootless port-forwarding tool now supports IPv6 forwarding while preserving the original source IP address. A new force_port_listen option has been introduced in containers.conf to support forwarding ports from the Windows host when Podman runs under WSL.
The podman info command has been expanded to report the amount of free host memory alongside the existing used and total memory figures.
Podman 6.1 also addresses a sizeable collection of bugs. Notable fixes include one that could cause the remote Podman client to hang during certain operations when connecting over SSH. Another fixes an issue with podman volume prune --all --filter, where label filters could be discarded, causing all eligible volumes to be removed instead of only those matching the specified label.
Other fixes cover corrupted healthcheck logs, duplicate hostPort handling with podman kube play, incomplete container cleanup following failed starts, problems with podman image scp when usernames contain an @ character, and several Podman Machine issues affecting both Windows and macOS hosts.
Finally, the release updates several underlying components, including Buildah 1.45, containers/image 5.41.1, containers/storage 1.64, and containers/common 0.69.1.
For additional details, see the changelog.
