The Podman team and the Fedora Quality Assurance team are organizing a Test Week from Friday, February 27 through Friday, March 6, 2026. This is your chance to get an early look at the latest improvements coming to Podman and see how they perform on your machine.
What is Podman?
For those new to the tool, Podman is a daemonless, Linux-native engine for running, building, and sharing OCI containers. It offers a familiar command-line experience but runs containers safely without requiring a root daemon.
What’s Coming in Podman 5.8?
The upcoming release includes updates designed to make Podman faster and more robust. Here is what you can look forward to, and what you can try out during this Fedora Test Day.
A Modern Database Backend (SQLite)
Podman is upgrading its internal storage logic by transitioning to SQLite. This change modernizes how Podman handles data under the hood, aiming for better stability and long-term robustness.
Faster Parallel Pulls
This release brings optimizations to how Podman downloads image layers, specifically when pulling multiple images at the same time. For a deep dive into the engineering behind this, check out the developer blog post on Accelerating Parallel Layer Creation.
Experiment and Explore: Feel free to push the system a bit and try pulling several large images simultaneously to see if you notice the performance boost. Beyond that, please bring your own workflows. Don’t just follow the wiki instructions. Run the containers and commands you use daily. Your specific use cases are the best way to uncover edge cases that standard tests might miss.
What do I need to do?
- Make sure you have a Fedora Account (FAS).
- Download test materials in advance where applicable, which may include some large files.
- Follow the steps on the wiki test page one by one.
- Send us your results through the app.
Details on how to test and report results are available at the Wiki Test Day site for Podman 5.8 test day:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2026-02-27_Podman_5.8
Test Week runs from Friday, February 27 through Friday, March 6, 2026
Thank you for taking part in the testing of Fedora Linux 44!
Jeff BuCher
Awesome! I absolutely love Podman!
I have a home server running Fedora for media and whatever else I want to experiment with, as well as a VPS running CentOS Stream 10 with Pangolin and the Grafana monitoring stack. All are rootless quadlets, so about 24ish quadlets in total and growing.
Speeding up pulls would be a huge time saver, and the change to SQLite sounds cool. I’ve gotta check the repo and see what all it’s meant to improve.
That said, I’m gonna try to make this test day
Caio
Nice job! I’m looking foward to check it out.
Odaena
That’s awesome, great work guys. Keep it up the good work!
steven bull
i am not quite sure what a podman is. audio listening pod
Gary Elam
Steven I’m really new to Podman also. However it is similar to Docker but potentially better in that it doesn’t need a daemon running in the background and the containers are rootless for the most part. There are a few other things that escape me.