- Kubeadm: avoided uploading a defaulted flag value "--authorization-mode=Node,RBAC" for the kube-apiserver in the ClusterConfiguration stored in the "kube-system/kubeadm-config" ConfigMap. "Node,RBAC" are already the kubeadm defaults for this flag, so this action is redundant....

  // reports this record in Assigned. Assigned only updates in the status after
  // the record has been checkpointed to disk. When the Kubelet is restarted,
  // it tries to make the Assigned config the Active config by loading and
  // validating the checkpointed payload identified by Assigned.
  // +optional
  optional NodeConfigSource assigned = 1;

  // Active reports the checkpointed config the node is actively using.

- New Metrics Added for Encryption Configuration Controller
  
  This release adds new metrics to the Encryption Configuration Controller to help monitor the automatic reloading of encryption configuration. The new metrics include:
  
  - `apiserver_encryption_config_controller_automatic_reload_failures_total`: Total number of failed automatic reloads of encryption configuration.

  the end. ([#112809](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/112809), [@tkashem](https://github.com/tkashem)) [SIG API Machinery]
- Kube-apiserver: removed N^2 behavior loading webhook configurations. ([#114794](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/114794), [@lavalamp](https://github.com/lavalamp)) [SIG API Machinery, Architecture, CLI, Cloud Provider and Node]

* kubectl and client-go now detect duplicated names for user, cluster and context when loading kubeconfig and report this condition as an error.  ([#60464](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/60464), [@roycaihw](https://github.com/roycaihw))

- Allow expansion of ephemeral volumes ([#109987](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/109987), [@gnufied](https://github.com/gnufied)) [SIG Node and Storage]
- Apiserver: fixed audit of loading more than one webhooks. ([#110145](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/110145), [@sxllwx](https://github.com/sxllwx))

* Support loading UTF16 files if a byte-order-mark is present ([#39008](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/39008), [@brendandburns](https://github.com/brendandburns))

* Windows kube-proxy will wait for HNS network creation on start ([#78612](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/78612), [@ksubrmnn](https://github.com/ksubrmnn))
* Fix error handling for loading initCfg in kubeadm upgrade and apply ([#78611](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/78611), [@odinuge](https://github.com/odinuge))

* Fix garbage collection and resource quota when the controller-manager uses --leader-elect=false ([#57340](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/57340), [@jmcmeek](https://github.com/jmcmeek))
* kube-apiserver: fixes loading of `--admission-control-config-file` containing AdmissionConfiguration apiserver.k8s.io/v1alpha1 config object ([#58441](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/58441), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))

* kube-apiserver: fixes loading of `--admission-control-config-file` containing AdmissionConfiguration apiserver.k8s.io/v1alpha1 config object ([#58439](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/58439), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))