- Whenever a pod was successfully bound to a node, the kube-apiserver  cleared the pod's `nominatedNodeName` field. This prevented stale information from affecting external scheduling components. ([#132443](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/132443), [@utam0k](https://github.com/utam0k)) [SIG Apps, Node, Scheduling and Testing]

- 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...

- Fixes a rare race condition handling requests that timeout ([#107458](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/107458), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt)) [SIG API Machinery]
- Mount-utils: Detect potential stale file handle ([#106988](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/106988), [@andyzhangx](https://github.com/andyzhangx)) [SIG Storage]

* fix smb remount issue on Windows ([#73661](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/73661), [@andyzhangx](https://github.com/andyzhangx))
* remove stale OutOfDisk condition from kubelet side ([#72507](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/72507), [@dixudx](https://github.com/dixudx))

* Fixes issue with cleaning up stale NFS subpath mounts ([#71804](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/71804), [@msau42](https://github.com/msau42))

- Fixes a rare race condition handling requests that timeout ([#107460](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/107460), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt)) [SIG API Machinery]
- Mount-utils: Detect potential stale file handle ([#107040](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/107040), [@andyzhangx](https://github.com/andyzhangx)) [SIG Storage]

### Other (Cleanup or Flake)

  fix: ensure InstanceShutdownByProviderID return false for creating Azure VMs ([#104448](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/104448), [@feiskyer](https://github.com/feiskyer)) [SIG Cloud Provider]
- Kube-proxy: delete stale conntrack UDP entries for loadbalancer ingress IP. ([#104152](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/104152), [@aojea](https://github.com/aojea)) [SIG Network]

- kube-proxy now reconciles Service/Endpoint changes with conntrack table and cleans up only stale UDP flow entries ([#127318](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/127318), [@aroradaman](https://github.com/aroradaman)) [SIG Network and Windows]

- Fixed a bug in client-go where new clients with customized `Dial`, `Proxy`, `GetCert` config may get stale HTTP transports. ([#95427](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/95427), [@roycaihw](https://github.com/roycaihw)) [SIG API Machinery]

    * sync time.
 
    * The goal is for administrators to be able to alert on proxies that, for
    * whatever reason, are quite stale.
* Fix a string comparison bug in IPVS graceful termination where UDP real servers are not deleted. ([#78999](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/78999), [@andrewsykim](https://github.com/andrewsykim))