- kubeadm: fixed panic when no UpgradeConfiguration was found in the config file. ([#130202](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/130202), [@SataQiu](https://github.com/SataQiu))

### API Change

  * Now the command will succeed even if the sort-by field is missing from one or more of the objects
* Fixed issue with kubectl proxy so it will now proxy an empty path - e.g. http://localhost:8001 ([#39226](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/39226), [@luksa](https://github.com/luksa))

- Kube-log-runner: rotating log output into a new file when reaching a certain file size can be requested via the new `-log-file-size` parameter. `-log-file-age` enables automatical removal of old output files.  Periodic flushing...

- Kube-apiserver: the `--encryption-provider-config` file is now loaded with strict deserialization, which fails if the config file contains duplicate or unknown fields. This protects against accidentally running with config files that are malformed, mis-indented, or have typos in field names, and getting unexpected behavior. When `--encryption-provider-config-automatic-reload` is used, new encryption config files that contain typos after the kube-apiserver is running are treated as...

- Fixed occasional pod cgroup freeze when using cgroup v1 and systemd driver.

- Fixed a bug where pv recycler failed to scrub volume with too many files in the directory due to hitting ARG_MAX limit with rm command (#117189). ([#117283](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/117283), [@defo89](https://github.com/defo89)) [SIG Cloud Provider and Storage]

  * The `--audit-policy-file` option is required if the `AdvancedAuditing` feature is not explicitly turned off (`--feature-gates=AdvancedAuditing=false`) on the API server.
  * The audit log file defaults to JSON encoding when using the advanced auditing feature gate.
  * An audit policy file without either an `apiVersion` or a `kind` field may be treated as invalid.
  * The webhook and log file now output the `v1beta1` event format.

*   Relative paths in the Kubelet's local config files (`--init-config-dir`) will now be resolved relative to the location of the containing files. ([#55648](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/55648),[ @mtaufen](https://github.com/mtaufen))

- Fixed an issue which didn't append OS's environment variables with the one provided in Credential Provider Config file, which may lead to failed execution of external credential provider binary. 
  See https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/102750 ([#103231](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/103231), [@n4j](https://github.com/n4j)) [SIG Auth and Node]