The five removals mark the end of a long deprecation cycle that began with Podman 4.0 in 2022, with formal warnings issued for over a year; these items will be permanently removed in 6.0.

Podman 6.0 introduces new Podman Machine capabilities and volume management changes, including new commands for operating VM OS updates and importing host CA certificates, with a migration note that Linux Podman Machines created before the upgrade must be recreated due to new mount paths.

The Podman volume prune behavior now removes only unused anonymous volumes by default, with new --all and --dry-run options to control what gets pruned.

Podman 6.0 is released as a major update featuring security fixes, new Podman Machine and Quadlet capabilities, AMD GPU support, and several breaking changes that retire legacy technologies.

Coordinated upgrades across Podman components are necessary, with the Go import path moving to the v6 domain.

Podman Machine can manage VMs from any provider; OS inside VMs can be updated via podman machine os update (not supported on WSL); importing host CA certificates into VMs is supported with --import-native-ca, and Linux VMs now mount host volumes via systemd, necessitating recreation of affected VMs.

Podman 6.0 includes a security patch for CVE-2026-57231 and the fix is backported to the 5.8.x line so teams can apply it without upgrading immediately.

Migration and compatibility require updating Buildah, Skopeo, Netavark, Aardvark, and related Go modules, along with switching Podman’s import path to go.podman.io/podman/v6.

Breaking changes include removing cgroups v1 in favor of v2, replacing iptables with nftables, moving CNI to Netavark, replacing slirp4netns with Pasta, and moving BoltDB to SQLite; RHEL 8 requires specific kernel boot parameter changes for upgrade, while newer distros default to v2.

Other removals include cgroups v1, iptables, CNI, slirp4netns, BoltDB and Windows Intel Mac support, with Netavark and Pasta as networking and rootless networking replacements.

A frequently asked questions section notes that a patch for CVE-2026-57231 can be applied on 5.x via 5.8.4, mixed Docker/Podman environments require planning due to nftables, and upgrades should be synchronized across Podman, Buildah, Skopeo, Netavark, Aardvark, and container-libs.

Podman 6.0 is positioned as a platform floor for 2026, with comprehensive migration guides available in the release notes.