- Updated static pods are restarted 2s faster by correcting a safe but non-optimal ordering bug. ([#116690](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/116690), [@smarterclayton](https://github.com/smarterclayton)) [SIG Node]

testing for runtime failures and now perform a more rigorous reconciliation to ensure static pods (especially those that use fixed UIDs) are restarted.  As a side effect of these changes static pods will be restarted with lower latency than before (2s vs 4s, on average) and rapid updates to pod configuration should take effect sooner.
  
  A new metric `kubelet_known_pods` has been added at ALPHA stability to report the number of pods a Kubelet is tracking in a number of internal states....