Podman 5.0 Switches to Apple's Hypervisor and SQLite

Podman 5.0 arrives

Podman 5.0 was released on March 19, 2024. As a major version it carried significant breaking changes, most notably an extensive rewrite of the podman machine backend: configuration files changed format, and VMs from Podman 4.x and earlier are no longer usable and must be recreated. It also fixed CVE-2024-1753 in Buildah and podman build.

Apple's native hypervisor

On macOS, VMs created by podman machine can now use the native Apple hypervisor (applehv), and QEMU is no longer a supported VM provider on Mac. A new podman machine reset command removes all existing machine VMs and their configuration, and podman machine init now pulls images as OCI artifacts instead of over HTTP, requiring a valid policy.json on the host.

SQLite by default and network changes

Podman 5.0 made SQLite the default database backend: it is no longer possible to create new BoltDB databases, though existing ones remain usable. The default tool for rootless networking was switched from slirp4netns to pasta for improved performance, and support for CNI networking was gated behind a build tag and is no longer enabled by default. Podman now warns on cgroups v1 systems, whose support is deprecated.

Docker compatibility and Quadlet

The release continued improving Docker compatibility, changing podman inspect output such as Entrypoint from a string to an array and StopSignal from an int to a string, making network statistics per-interface, and enabling --gpus with Nvidia GPUs. Quadlet gained templated units, systemd-style drop-in directories, and new .pod unit files for creating pods declaratively.

Related on Skillo

See also: Podman 4.4 and Quadlet, Kubernetes 1.30 'Uwubernetes'.

Sources

• Podman v5.0.0 release (github.com/containers/podman)

Published date reflects the original event date (2024-03-19). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.