It is coming together nicely — Update

When we released Podman 4, we also released a new “network stack” that in large part was provided by netavark. At that time, a couple of features were missing for us to achieve parity with the previous network stack based on CNI Plugins. One key missing feature was using MacVLAN and DHCP with your containers. I have written about DHCP and MacVLAN in the past, specifically on how to set it up including an example.

One thing that makes this function “tricky” is that because containers generally do not have DHCP-clients, you need some sort of proxy that acts like a DHCP server and a client. This is where netavark-dhcp-proxy comes in. It has been somewhat slow to come to fruition and still is not complete, but it is function enough to work now.

Today, for the first time, I was able to create the container in Podman and watch netavark and the netavark-proxy do its thing. The container showed a proper routable IP address. Now we need to tighten up a couple of issues like SystemD socket activation and activity timeouts.

Brent Baude