# containerd v2.3.4 — containerd 2.3.4 - Product: containerd (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/containerd) - Vendor: CNCF - Date: 2026-08-12 - Version: v2.3.4 - Original notes: https://github.com/containerd/containerd/releases/tag/v2.3.4 - Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/containerd/releases/v2.3.4 What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog. Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'. --- - **changed** — Disable checkpoint restore in CreateContainer by default, requiring the enable_experimental_restore_via_create configuration option to enable - **changed** — Set default runtimeFeatures.UserNamespacesHostNetwork to true in CRI - **deprecated** — Checkpoint restore in CreateContainer - **added** — Support non-UTF-8 binary environment variable values in CRI - **added** — Enable OCI runtime feature introspection for non-runc runtimes in CRI - **added** — Add enable_criu configuration option and disable checkpoint restore codepaths when CRIU is not installed - **added** — Normalize sandbox image references in CRI to resolve images without domain prefixes - **deprecated** — Emit deprecation warnings for plugins using deprecated NRI interfaces - **changed** — Enable log scrubbing by default on Windows - **fixed** — Memory leak in OOM watcher map when stopping container monitoring - **fixed** — Avoid orphaning shims on transient errors when loading process IDs - **fixed** — Corruption of binary protobuf shim start responses caused by premature whitespace trimming - **fixed** — EROFS snapshotter dropping lower layers stacked above merged filesystem metadata Welcome to the v2.3.4 release of containerd! The fourth patch release for containerd 2.3 contains various fixes and updates. ###### Highlights ###### Container Runtime Interface (CRI) * Disable checkpoint restore in CreateContainer by default, requiring the enable_experimental_restore_via_create configuration option to enable ([#13913](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13913)) * Set default runtimeFeatures.UserNamespacesHostNetwork to true in CRI ([#13914](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13914)) * Deprecate checkpoint restore in CreateContainer ([#13868](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13868)) * Support non-UTF-8 binary environment variable values in CRI ([#13454](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13454)) * Enable OCI runtime feature introspection for non-runc runtimes in CRI ([#13778](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13778)) * Disable checkpoint restore codepaths when CRIU is not installed and add enable_criu configuration option ([#13734](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13734)) * Normalize sandbox image references in CRI to resolve images without domain prefixes ([#13759](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13759)) ###### Node Resource Interface (NRI) * Emit deprecation warnings for plugins using deprecated NRI interfaces ([#13935](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13935)) ###### Runtime * Enable log scrubbing by default on Windows ([#13904](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13904)) * Fix memory leak in OOM watcher map when stopping container monitoring ([#13870](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13870)) * Avoid orphaning shims on transient errors when loading process IDs ([#13857](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13857)) * Fix corruption of binary protobuf shim start responses caused by premature whitespace trimming ([#13803](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13803)) ###### Snapshotters * Fix EROFS snapshotter dropping lower layers stacked above merged filesystem metadata ([#13876](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13876)) ###### Breaking * Disable checkpoint restore in CreateContainer by default, requiring the enable_experimental_restore_via_create configuration option to enable ([#13913](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13913)) ###### Deprecations * Deprecate checkpoint restore in CreateContainer ([#13868](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13868)) Please try out the release binaries and report any issues at https://github.com/containerd/containerd/issues. ###### Contributors * Samuel Karp * Maksym Pavlenko * Mike Brown * Akihiro Suda * Derek McGowan * Jordan Liggitt * Paweł Gronowski * Amir Alavi * Andrew Halaney * Bing Hongtao * Chris Henzie * Harshal Patel * Krisztian Litkey * Phil Estes * Wei Fu * ningmingxiao ###### Changes
35 commits

* [`c1f5360ef`](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/commit/c1f5360ef7b9afb748d4119ad7be665ba5144480) Prepare release notes for v2.3.4 * cri: disable restore in CreateContainer by default ([#13913](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13913)) * [`928c03c68`](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/commit/928c03c6898cad95f795300281fdff0dbc55a32f) cri: disable restore in CreateContainer by default * nri,deprecation: record and emit warnings for NRI deprecations. ([#13935](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13935)) * [`5966e2edb`](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/commit/5966e2edb15bb939aa2bb73649fbad73a2b04094) nri,deprecation: emit warnings for old NRI plugins. * Set the default of runtimeFeatures.UserNamespacesHostNetwork to true ([#13914](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/13914)) * [`ab52c58f1`](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/commit/ab52c58f16ac50bb6724354bf36cbb4da480c2a2) Set the default of runtimeFeatures.UserNamespacesHostNetwork to true * Use ScrubLogs by default on Windows ([#13904](htt _[Truncated at 4000 characters — full notes: https://github.com/containerd/containerd/releases/tag/v2.3.4]_