Clarify the latest version of podman 5.2.2

[kunisen]

Description

Previously the latest version of podman 5.2.2 was 5.2.2-13. However, now the latest version is 5.2.2-15.

We have confirmed with that @matt-elastic in an internal discussion here that it makes sense to make such change.

Thus, we need to update the public doc to reflect this. Also, we want to avoid saying 5.2.2-15 and then later we need to update the public docs again, so we are using a more generic way to express it.

Special Note

@matt-elastic could you also help us confirm if the command in use is correct or not please?
I don't have a RHEL environment to test for now and I am making the change on the fly.
Thank you!

Before / After PR merge

:: Before

https://www.elastic.co/docs/deploy-manage/deploy/cloud-enterprise/configure-host-rhel

:: After

---

cc @rheppe

[kunisen]

Hi @matt-elastic may I trouble you to kindly take a look about this and let me know if anything is missing or clear please?
We want to merge this to avoid future confusion from users. thanks!

[matt-elastic]

Thank you for your efforts and the improvements, @kunisen. I concur that the currently specified versions are overly specific.

I verified that Podman 5.2.2 is currently (still) available on RHEL 9.6

[ec2-user@ip-192-168-44-41 ~]$ sudo dnf install podman-5.2.2
Updating Subscription Management repositories.
Unable to read consumer identity

This system is not registered with an entitlement server. You can use "rhc" or "subscription-manager" to register.

Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:16 ago on Thu 12 Jun 2025 03:18:52 PM UTC.
Dependencies resolved.
===============================================================================================================================================================================================================================================
 Package                                                  Architecture                                 Version                                                          Repository                                                        Size
===============================================================================================================================================================================================================================================
Installing:
 podman                                                   x86_64                                       4:5.2.2-16.el9_5                                                 rhel-9-appstream-rhui-rpms                                        16 M

I think the version numbers originate from the documentation we created during the analysis of the healthcheck bug. At that time, 5.2.2-13, or more generally 5.2.2, was the most recent version. However, the latest version is now Podman 5.4. Since 5.2.2 is still available in default repository, I think this update is fine.

I think mid-term, we should consider mentioning 5.* in the same way as we do for Podman 4 (4.*). But before we can do that, we need to test the in-place upgrade with 5.4. For a fresh installation, we already use 5.4 (see screenshot).

In-place upgrades

For in-place updates, it is recommended to use Podman 5.2.2-9, since upgrades to versions 5.2.2-11 and 5.2.2-13 are affected by a known memory leak issue

Currently, the latest 5.2.2 version is 5.2.2-16. I think we need to double check if the health check bug is fixed in that version. If yes, that would simplify things a lot (exclude -11, and -13`).

My understanding is that we still recommend the Podman version of a given RHEL OS that is installed by default. Would you agree with this?