Podman 6.0 overhauls networking, Quadlets, and Docker compatibility

Podman’s sixth major release retires the older slirp4netns and iptables networking components in favor of Netavark, Pasta, and nftables, consolidating the stack to ease maintenance and unlock future work. Notably, experimental Pasta-based rootless port forwarding can now preserve the correct source IP for rootless containers running on custom networks — long a pain point for that mode.

Beyond networking, Podman Machine gains smoother handling of multiple VM providers and a new podman machine os update command for keeping VM environments current. Quadlets, Podman’s systemd-integration mechanism, get a substantial rework: REST API support, better tracking of related files, expanded .volume unit options, and extra search paths that make distribution packaging simpler. Configuration file handling has also been reworked to behave more predictably in multi-user, admin-managed setups.

The release continues Podman’s push toward drop-in Docker compatibility through updated Docker API coverage and refined command output, lowering the friction of migrating existing workflows. Built over months of contributions from the project’s community, v6.0.0 is available on GitHub with package-manager distribution to follow.