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Oracle Linux Training Station

Use Pasta Networking

Ol Lab Tutorial Ol-Podman
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🌙 Lab

🗒️ Tutorial

Details

Oracle Linux 9 Update 5 changed the default tool for rootless container networking from slirp4netns to pasta. So what is Podman pasta networking? Pasta is an acronym for “Pack A Subtle Tap Abstraction”.

Pasta uses the passt network driver, introduced in Oracle Linux 9 Update 1, to allow rootless containers to create a network namespace and forward network traffic to the namespace. Pasta networking uses the passt driver as a translation layer between a Layer-2 network interface and Layer-4 socket traffic using TCP, UDP, and ICMP echo on the host. Pasta networking does not require elevated privileges (root), which allows Podman to run rootless containers.

Podman pasta networking delivers these benefits:

  • Seamlessly integrated with Podman v4.1 and higher and is the default from Podman 5.3 onwards.
  • Improved network performance for rootless containers, especially compared to alternatives such as slirp4netns.
  • Designed to work with rootless containers, allowing users to run containers without requiring elevated privileges and enhancing system security.
  • Uses the host’s IP address instead of the slirp4netns method, which uses a predefined container IP address.
  • Uses a network interface name from the host instead of the slirp4netns default of tap0.

Objectives

In this tutorial, you’ll learn to:

  • Define and use pasta networks with Podman
  • Verify a container is using pasta networking

Prerequisites

  • Two Oracle Linux systems

  • Each system should have Oracle Linux installed and configured with:

    • A non-root user account with sudo access
    • The latest Oracle Linux Release
    • Podman and cURL packages
    • Access to the Internet