Podman 4.0 Rewrites Its Network Stack With Netavark

Podman 4.0 arrives

Podman 4.0 was released on February 17, 2022. As a major version, it performed several schema migrations in Podman's database on first run, and the team warned that downgrading afterward would cause containers to lose static IPs, MAC addresses and port bindings. It also fixed CVE-2022-1227, a privilege issue in podman top on maliciously crafted images.

The Netavark network stack

The headline was an extensive rewrite of Podman's network stack to add support for Netavark, a new tool for configuring container networks, alongside the existing CNI stack. Netavark became the default on new installations when available, and podman info now reports which backend is in use. The rewrite also enabled dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 networks with user-specified subnets, a new --ip6 option, and the ipvlan driver on CNI.

podman machine and WSL

For Windows users, podman machine init gained a new wsl VM type that uses WSL as the backend instead of managing a separate QEMU VM. Virtual machines created by podman machine now automatically mount the Podman API socket to the host, mount host certificates, and propagate proxy environment variables into the VM.

Pods and Docker compatibility

podman pod create gained many options previously limited to containers, including --volume, --device, --volumes-from, --security-opt and --sysctl, applying them to all containers in a pod. The release also made numerous Docker-compatibility changes to podman inspect output, renamed several internal container states, and set host.containers.internal in rootless /etc/hosts to a reachable host IP.

Related on Skillo

See also: Podman 4.4 and Quadlet, Docker Desktop for Linux reaches GA.

Sources

• Podman v4.0.0 release (github.com/containers/podman)

Published date reflects the original event date (2022-02-17). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.