With Podman 6 bringing big under‑the‑hood networking and modernization changes, Fedora is calling on experienced users to put the daemonless container engine through its paces.
With the daemonless container platform Podman 6 scheduled for release near the end of May, the folks at Fedora are hard at work making sure they get it right. That’s why they’re looking for some Fedora users who are also familiar with running Podman to participate in some Fedora Test Days next weekend.
The Test Days are happening May 11-15. The announcement came today by way of Petr Sklenar, principal quality engineer at Red Hat, posting on Fedora’s website.
If you don’t know, Fedora Test Days are days the team at Fedora sets aside to enlist users to volunteer to do some organized testing. This way, when the product is officially released in the wild, the software will have operated on enough hardware combinations to assure developers that it’ll work well when facing the hardware gene pool in the great wide yonder.
Meet the New Podman
The focus on Podman 6, due to be released toward the end of May, makes it clear Fedora is doing some advance work for Red Hat.
According to Sklenar, the new Podman is going to be a major modernization release that removes some legacy components and completes some already announced deprecation. This includes changes to Netavark, the Rust-based stack for networking containers, which is switching from iptables to nftables to align with current Fedora defaults. Also, the networking tool slirp4netns and the embedded key–value database BoltDB are out the door, replaced by Pasta and SQLite respectively.
The changes are primarily to reduce technical debt and create a more maintainable codebase, he said, adding that this has resulted in cleaner configuration and a redesigned client/server configuration.
How to Be a Tester
Basically, all you’re going to need to participate is to download and install the latest nightly image of Fedora 45, either virtually or on a physical machine, and then fully update the system. You can link to the ISO on the Podman 6.0 wiki, along with links to test cases. After that, all you need to do is run the tests and report your results. Easy peasy, eh?
If you need help, not to worry. Help will be available throughout the week on Matrix at #podman:fedoraproject.org. Alternately, you can join the mailing list at test@lists.fedoraproject.org.
For more information go to Podman 6.0 Change page or Podman 6.0 Test Days.
Happy testing. We’ll see you at the Fedora 45 release party in October!
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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