- Client-go: improved allocation behavior of the delaying workqueue when handling objects with far-future ready times. ([#83945](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/83945), [@barkbay](https://github.com/barkbay))

  
  As this code is still very new, it has not been heavily optimized yet;
  while it is expected to _eventually_ have better performance than the
  iptables backend, very little performance testing has been done so far. ([#121046](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/121046), [@danwinship](https://github.com/danwinship))

- The (alpha) nftables mode of kube-proxy now requires version 1.0.1 or later
  of the nft command-line, and kernel 5.13 or later. (For testing/development
  purposes, you can use older kernels, as far back as 5.4, if you set the
  `nftables.skipKernelVersionCheck` option in the kube-proxy config, but this is not
  recommended in production since it may cause problems with other nftables

* Support for structured configuration for the kubelet, which avoids the need to modify the systemd drop-in file
* Many improvements to the upgrade process and other bug fixes

### SIG Instrumentation