- `kubeadm`: improved the logic that checks whether a `systemd` service exists. ([#120514](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/120514), [@fengxsong](https://github.com/fengxsong))
- `kubeadm`: will now use universal deserializer to decode static pod. ([#120549](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/120549), [@pacoxu](https://github.com/pacoxu))
- `kubectl prune v2`: Switched annotation from `contains-group-resources` to `contains-group-kinds`,

  request. A resource is considered corrupt if it can not be successfully retrieved from the storage due to
  a) transformation error e.g. decryption failure, or b) the object failed to decode. Normal deletion flow is
  attempted first, and if it fails with a corrupt resource error then it triggers unsafe delete.
  In addition, when this feature is enabled, the 'details' field of 'Status' from the LIST response

- The `apiserver.latency.k8s.io/decode-response-object` annotation was added to the audit log to record the decoding time. ([#121512](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/121512), [@HirazawaUi](https://github.com/HirazawaUi))

- Add a helper function to decode scheduler plugin args. ([#80696](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/80696), [@hex108](https://github.com/hex108))

([#64248](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/64248), [@feiskyer](https://github.com/feiskyer))

### SIG CLI

* You can now use the `base64decode` function in kubectl go templates to decode base64-encoded data, such as `kubectl get secret SECRET -o go-template='{{ .data.KEY | base64decode }}'`. ([#60755](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/60755), [@glb](https://github.com/glb))

* Allows changing nodeName in endpoint update. ([#68575](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/68575), [@prameshj](https://github.com/prameshj))
* kube-apiserver would return 400 Bad Request when it couldn't decode a json patch. ([#68346](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/68346), [@CaoShuFeng](https://github.com/CaoShuFeng))
    * kube-apiserver would return 422 Unprocessable Entity when a json patch couldn't be applied to one object.

* Protobuf serialization does not distinguish between `[]` and `null`.

expunged from the Kubelet API. ([#60314](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/60314))

* [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/49213](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/49213) sig-cluster-lifecycle has decided to phase out the cluster/ directory over the next couple of releases in favor of deployment automations maintained outside of the core repo and outside of kubernetes orgs. ([@kubernetes/sig-cluster-lifecycle-misc](https://github.com/orgs/kubernet...