Podman 6, an open-source container management tool for building, running, and managing Linux containers, is now expected to launch in late May, following a shift from the originally planned mid-May release window.
The Podman development team previously scheduled Podman 6 for release during the week of May 11-15. The new target is the week of May 25-29 at the earliest, providing developers more time to complete outstanding work and prepare release candidates for testing.
The remaining work focuses on features planned for the major release. A key change is the rework of Podman’s configuration file handling, which is expected to benefit Podman Desktop.
Podman 6 will also finalize several major cleanups. Support for slirp4netns, cgroups v1, and the BoltDB database backend will be removed, while Netavark, Pasta, cgroups v2, and SQLite will become required. The update also removes the --network-cmd-path option, previously associated with slirp4netns.
On the networking side, Netavark (a container network stack) will drop iptables support in favor of nftables, consolidate network creation logic within Netavark, and preserve network order for containers.
Because many of the remaining changes are breaking, the project chose not to defer them to a later Podman 6.1 release. Postponing them until Podman 7 would have resulted in a much longer wait. As a result, the Podman 6 release has been delayed.
The Podman team states that the additional time will be used to complete outstanding work and deliver a stable, feature-complete Podman 6 release. For more details, see the announcement.
