Podman 6: machine usability improvements

I wanted to introduce a significant change we are making in Podman 6 for our machine function. To understand the problem and change, we first need to establish that Podman machine is based on a concept of providers. The provider is a generic term that describes how Podman runs the Linux virtual machine. The following table is a list of providers by platform.

In Podman 5, particularly with the use of Podman Desktop and with platforms that supported multiple providers, it was possible to create machines for either provider without changing the default provider as defined in ~/.config/containers/containers.conf. So if you created or ran a machine in the non-default provider with Podman Desktop and then decided to use the Podman CLI, the CLI would be unaware of the existence of the machine. This is because Podman was only aware of machines and the existence of machines within the confines of its default provider–with one or two minor exceptions. Consider the following:

$ podman -v podman version 5.7.0-dev In Podman 5, the default provider per platform was hardcoded in the Podman binary. It could be overridden in containers.conf. This indicates that we are setting libkrun as the default machine provider.