Arch Linux

theben_m

Member

Registered: 2026-01-12

Posts: 2

Podman containers fail after system upgrade - missing nftables

I am not completely sure where to put this - i think this might be a dependency issue of one of the podman packages.

Todays pcaman -Syu broke some/all of my podman containers. Containers failed with the following message:

Jan 12 12:23:05 <host> <container>: Error: netavark: nftables error: unable to execute "nft": No such file or directory (os error 2)

I was able to solve this by manually installing nftables package.

My setup uses rootful podman containers operated by systemd (Podman Quadlet).

Edit: Last pcaman -Syu might have been some while ago - Dec 04 14:54:58

Last edited by theben_m (2026-01-12 12:48:21)

WorMzy

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From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 13,294

Website

Re: Podman containers fail after system upgrade - missing nftables

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/ … 69023e6dd9
https://github.com/containers/netavark/ … 45003975c7

TL;DR support for iptables (the previous default) has been dropped by netavark, so the new default is nftables.

Side note: you may want to switch to using crun instead of runc -- the former depends on nftables via criu, but the latter only optdepends on criu.

I'm not sure if the lack of explicit dependency on nftables is a bug in runc, since netavark isn't technically the default network backend. It may be worth opening a ticket on the gitlab to raise it with the maintainer.

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Sakura:-
Mobo: MSI MAG X570S TORPEDO MAX // Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X @4.9GHz // GFX: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT // RAM: 32GB (4x 8GB) Corsair DDR4 (@ 3000MHz) // Storage: 1x 3TB HDD, 6x 1TB SSD, 2x 120GB SSD, 1x 275GB M2 SSD

Making lemonade from lemons since 2015.

theben_m

Member

Registered: 2026-01-12

Posts: 2

Re: Podman containers fail after system upgrade - missing nftables

It seems this happens when podman was installed prior to the change of the default from runc to crun. The podman package itself depends on oci-runtime (crun, runc, krun). So pacman never sees any issue.

I am a bit lost on who to raise this with - do you suggest the runc maintaier on the archlinux gitlab (https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/ … kages/runc)?

WorMzy

Administrator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 13,294

Website

Re: Podman containers fail after system upgrade - missing nftables

Thinking about it some more, it'd be better to file the issue against the netavark package. That's where the dependency is coming from, the OCI runtimes just depend on container-network-stack, which netavark provides.

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Sakura:-
Mobo: MSI MAG X570S TORPEDO MAX // Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X @4.9GHz // GFX: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT // RAM: 32GB (4x 8GB) Corsair DDR4 (@ 3000MHz) // Storage: 1x 3TB HDD, 6x 1TB SSD, 2x 120GB SSD, 1x 275GB M2 SSD

Making lemonade from lemons since 2015.