The Fedora project has announced a series of Test Days for Podman 6.0, the upcoming major release of the container engine developed as an alternative to Docker without a central daemon. The testing of the new branch will take place from May 11 to May 15 and is aimed at both developers and regular Fedora users.
Podman 6.0 will be one of the largest updates to the project in recent times. Developers are preparing significant overhauls of the networking subsystem, updates to container interaction mechanisms, and internal changes to the architecture of runtime components. Some of the innovations aim to improve compatibility with Kubernetes and OCI tools.
In Fedora, they note that the main goal of the Test Days is to verify backward compatibility and identify issues in real-world usage scenarios. Users are invited to test:
- the launch of rootless containers;
- the operation of compose-compatible configurations;
- network modes;
- interaction with systemd;
- the migration of existing environments from Podman 5.x.
Particular attention is being paid to changes in container networking. Developers continue the gradual modernization of the network stack, including improvements in integration with Netavark and Aardvark DNS—the components that have replaced the old CNI mechanisms.
Podman has long been one of the key components of the Fedora and Red Hat ecosystem. The project is actively used in server Linux distributions, CI/CD infrastructure, and development environments due to its support for rootless mode and compatibility with OCI containers without the need for a constantly running daemon process.
The release of Podman 6.0 is expected after the completion of testing and addressing identified bugs. Fedora developers emphasize that community participation in Test Days directly impacts the stability of the future release.
Source: linux.org.ru
