Podman 4.4 Introduces Quadlet and pasta Networking

Podman 4.4 lands

Podman 4.4 was released on February 1, 2023. The release focused on making Podman easier to run under systemd and on continuing its move away from CNI, which the team announced was being deprecated in favor of Netavark, now the default network backend.

Quadlet for systemd

The headline was Quadlet, a new systemd generator that lets users write and maintain systemd services for Podman containers using simple declarative unit files, rather than hand-writing complex service files or relying on podman generate systemd. It became one of Podman's most-adopted features for running containers as first-class systemd services.

pasta networking and healthchecks

Podman 4.4 added a new rootless networking mode, pasta, enabled with --net=pasta, as a more performant alternative to slirp4netns. The release also introduced startup healthchecks, which run a command to confirm a container is fully started before the regular healthcheck activates, and added a podman network update command.

Images and Kubernetes

The release added --encryption-key and --encrypt-layer options to podman push for encrypting images to a registry, with a matching --decryption-key on pull and run. On the Kubernetes side, a new podman kube apply command deploys generated YAML to a cluster, and podman kube play gained support for startup probes, volume subpaths and importing tarball contents. It also added --sign-by-sigstore using Fulcio and Rekor.

Related on Skillo

See also: Podman 4.0 and the Netavark rewrite, Podman 5.0 and Apple hypervisor machines.

Sources

• Podman v4.4.0 release (github.com/containers/podman)

Published date reflects the original event date (2023-02-01). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.