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Podman 6, the upcoming major release of the popular open-source container management tool, has slipped past its original launch window. What was previously scheduled for the week of May 11–15 is now targeting the week of May 25–29 at the earliest, giving the development team more runway to wrap up outstanding work and get release candidates properly tested.
What’s Causing the Delay?
The short answer: there’s simply a lot left to finish, and the team didn’t want to cut corners on a major release. A significant piece of the remaining work involves reworking how Podman handles its configuration files a change expected to have meaningful downstream benefits for Podman Desktop users.
Beyond that, Podman 6 is finalizing some substantial housecleaning that couldn’t easily be pushed further down the road. The project is dropping support for slirp4netns, cgroups v1, and the BoltDB database backend entirely. In their place, Netavark, Pasta, cgroups v2, and SQLite are becoming hard requirements. The --network-cmd-path option, which was tied to slirp4netns, is also being removed.
Networking Changes
On the networking front, Netavark is making a clean break from iptables in favor of nftables. The update also consolidates network creation logic within Netavark itself and adds proper preservation of network order for containers a detail that matters more than it might seem in complex multi-container setups.
Why Not Just Defer These Changes?
The team considered pushing the more disruptive changes to either Podman 6.1 or holding them entirely for Podman 7, but neither option was attractive. Deferring to 6.1 doesn’t quite make sense for breaking changes of this magnitude, and waiting for Podman 7 would have meant users sitting on legacy behavior for considerably longer. Getting everything done in Podman 6, even if it means a short delay, was the more sensible call.
The team has been clear that the extra time is being used to deliver a release that’s both stable and fully complete rather than shipping something half-finished on schedule. Full details are available in the official announcement on the Podman blog.
