- Kubeadm: add support for certificate chain validation. When using kubeadm in external CA mode, this allows an intermediate CA to be used to sign the certificates. The intermediate CA certificate must be appended to each signed certificate for this to work correctly. ([#97266](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/97266), [@robbiemcmichael](https://github.com/robbiemcmichael)) [SIG Cluster Lifecycle]

- Kubelet no longer creates certain legacy iptables rules by default.
  It is possible that this will cause problems with some third-party components
  that improperly depended on those rules. If this affects you, you can run

- Fixed a situation when, sometimes, the scheduler incorrectly placed a pod in the `unschedulable` queue instead of the `backoff` queue. This happened when some plugin previously declared the pod as `unschedulable` and then in a later attempt encounters some other error. Scheduling of that pod then got delayed by up to five minutes, after which periodic flushing moved the pod back into the `active`...

- Fixed the wrong hierarchical structure for both the child span and the parent span (i.e. `SerializeObject` and `List`). In the past, some children's spans appeared parallel to their parents. ([#127551](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/127551), [@carlory](https://github.com/carlory)) [SIG API Machinery and Instrumentation]

  2. if there's a transient error happened during "provisioning/deletion", i.e., a volume is still in-use while a deleteVolume has been called, original `storage_operation_duration_seconds` will NOT wait until a volume has been finally deleted before reporting an inaccurate latency metric....

* kubeadm: fix a case where fetching a kubernetesVersion from the internet still happened even if some commands don't need it. ([#69645](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/69645), [@neolit123](https://github.com/neolit123))

- Fix kubelet to properly log when a container is started. Previously, kubelet may log that container is dead and was restarted when it was actually started for the first time. This behavior only happened on pods with initContainers and regular containers. ([#91469](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/91469), [@rata](https://github.com/rata))

- Sometimes, the scheduler incorrectly placed a pod in the "unschedulable" queue instead of the "backoff" queue. This happened when some plugin previously declared the pod as "unschedulable" and then in a later attempt encounters some other error. Scheduling of that pod then got delayed by up to five minutes, after which periodic flushing moved the pod back into the "active"...

### **Application Autoscaling**
#### Horizontal Pod Autoscaler
* [alpha] [HPA Status Conditions](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/horizontal-pod-autoscale-walkthrough/#appendix-horizontal-pod-autoscaler-status-conditions).


### **Cluster Lifecycle**
#### kubeadm

- Sometimes, the scheduler incorrectly placed a pod in the "unschedulable" queue instead of the "backoff" queue. This happened when some plugin previously declared the pod as "unschedulable" and then in a later attempt encounters some other error. Scheduling of that pod then got delayed by up to five minutes, after which periodic flushing moved the pod back into the "active"...