Deep Dive: FreeBSD Podman Networking, Custom CNI, and Resource Accounting

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:00:00 -0400

When running native OCI containers on FreeBSD with Podman and ocijail, networking is one of the most interesting—and sometimes confusing—parts of the setup. Because Podman translates container commands into FreeBSD jail(2) system calls, container interfaces aren’t just Linux veth pairs inside network namespaces; they leverage FreeBSD’s VNET (Virtual Network Stack), epair(4) interface pairs, and standard CNI plugins.

Here is a practical deep dive into how Podman container networking works on FreeBSD, how to build custom CNI bridge networks for VLANs, how to fix podman stats metric collection with RACCT, and how to structure multi-container Compose setups.

Cni on Michael Johnson

Deep Dive: FreeBSD Podman Networking, Custom CNI, and Resource Accounting