- From now on, the HPA controller will return an error for the container resource metrics when the feature gate "HPAContainerMetrics" is disabled. As a result, HPA with a container resource metric performs no scale-down and performs only scale-up based on other metrics. ([#116043](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/116043), [@sanposhiho](https://github.com/sanposhiho)) [SIG API Machinery, Apps and Autoscaling]

* Fix kubelet PVC stale metrics ([#59170](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/59170), [@cofyc](https://github.com/cofyc))
* Restores the ability of older clients to delete and scale jobs with initContainers ([#59880](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/59880), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))

- Fix panic if there are more terminating pods than active pods ([#122267](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/122267), [@kannon92](https://github.com/kannon92)) [SIG Apps]
- Fix: statle smb mount issue when smb file share is deleted and then unmount ([#121851](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/121851), [@andyzhangx](https://github.com/andyzhangx)) [SIG Storage]
- Fixed a regression since 1.27.0 in scheduler framework when running score plugins. 

- Resolves an issue that causes winkernel proxier to treat stale VIPs as valid ([#113567](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/113567), [@daschott](https://github.com/daschott)) [SIG Network and Windows]

An API server fronted by an L7 load balancer that already mitigates these http/2 attacks may choose not to enable the kube-apiserver mitigation to avoid disrupting load balancer → kube-apiserver connections if http/2 requests from multiple clients share the same backend connection. An API server on a private network may choose not to enable the kube-apiserver mitigation to prevent performance regressions for unauthenticated clients. Authenticated requests rely on the fix in golang.org/x/net v0.17.0...

- Kubeadm will cleanup the stale data on best effort basis. Stale data will be removed when each reset phase are executed, default etcd data directory will be cleanup when the `remove-etcd-member` phase are executed. ([#110972](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/110972), [@chendave](h...

- Fixed some invalid and unimportant log calls. ([#121249](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/121249), [@pohly](https://github.com/pohly)) [SIG Cloud Provider, Cluster Lifecycle and Testing]
- Fixed stale SMB mount issue when SMB file share is deleted and then unmounted. ([#121851](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/121851), [@andyzhangx](https://github.com/andyzhangx))