Podman Roadmap

The Podman development team reviews feature requests from its various stakeholders for consideration quarterly. Podman maintainers then prioritize these features. Top features are then assigned to one or more engineers.

Future feature considerations

The following features are of general importantance to Podman. While these features have no timeline associated with them yet, they will likely be on future quarterly milestones.

• Further improvements to podman machine to better support Podman Desktop and other developer usecases.
  • Smoother upgrade process for Podman machine operating system (OS) images
  • Convergence of WSL technologies with other providers including its OS
• Remote client support for OCI artifacts and its RESTFUL API
• Integration of composefs
• Ongoing work around partial pull support (zstd:chunked)
• Improved support for the BuildKit API.
• Performance and stability improvements.
• Reductions to the size of the Podman binary.

Milestones and commitments by quarter

This section is a historical account of what features were prioritized by quarter. Results of the prioritization will be added at start of each quarter (Jan, Apr, July, Oct).

2025 Q3

Releases

• Podman 5.6
• Podman 6 (Spring 2026) High Level Design

Features

• Ongoing upgrades to support newer Docker API versions in the RESTFUl service
• Improvements to Quadlet documentation
• Systemwide rootless user configuration
• Improvements to the Windows installer

CNCF

• Continue towards incubation

2025 Q2

Releases

• Podman 5.5
• Fully automated Podman releases

Features

• Windows ARM64 installer
• Add support for artifacts in RESTFUL service
• Reduce binary size of Podman
• Add remote client support for artifacts
• Add support for newer Docker API versions to RESTFUL service
• Replace Podman pause image with a rootfs

CNCF

• Add and adhere to Governance model

2025 Q1

Releases

• Podman 5.4
• Podman release automation

Features

• Artifact add --append
• Artifact extract
• Artifact add --options
• Mount OCI artifacts inside containers
• Determine strategy for configuration files when remote

CNCF

• Create Maintainers file
• Create Governance documentation