- The kube-apiserver will no longer serve APIs that should have been deleted in GA non-alpha levels.  Alpha levels will continue to serve the removed APIs so that CI doesn't immediately break. ([#96525](https://github.com/kubernetes/...

- In the API Priority and Fairness feature, priority levels that are exempt from limitation can now be given a nominal and a lendable concurrency and their dispatching borrows from the concurrency limits of the other priority levels.  For details see https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/tree/master/keps/sig-api-machinery/1040-priority-and-fairness#dispatching . ([#118782](https://gith...

- The fallback behavior of the Downward API's `resourceFieldRef` field was updated to account for pod-level resources: if container-level limits were not set, pod-level limits were now used before falling back to node allocatable resources. ([#132605](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/132605), [@toVersus](https://github.com/toVersus)) [SIG Node, Scheduling and Testing]

- PersistentVolumeLabel admission plugin, responsible for labeling `PersistentVolumes` with topology labels, now does not overwrite existing labels on PVs that were dynamically provisioned. It trusts the  dynamic provisioning that it provided the correct labels to the `PersistentVolume`, saving one potentially expensive cloud API call. `PersistentVolumes` created manually by users are labelled by the admission plugin in the same...

scalability testing in a continuous integration (CI) environment. The SIG
defined a concrete process for scalability testing, created
documentation for the current scalability thresholds, and defined a new set of
Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for the system.
Here's the release [scalability validation report].

[SIG Scalability]: https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/sig-scalability

- Pod template annotations and labels are now mutable for Jobs that are suspended and have never been started ([#105980](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/105980), [@ahg-g](https://github.com/ahg-g))

# v1.7.7

### Other (Cleanup or Flake)

- Client-go header logging (at verbosity levels >= 9) now masks `Authorization` header contents ([#95316](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/95316), [@sfowl](https://github.com/sfowl)) [SIG API Machinery]

## Dependencies

### Added
_Nothing has changed._

  - cAdvisor json endpoints have been deprecated since 1.15. ([#78504](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/78504), [@dashpole](https://github.com/dashpole))

<h3 id="Package_initialization">Package initialization</h3>

<p>
Within a package, package-level variable initialization proceeds stepwise,
with each step selecting the variable earliest in <i>declaration order</i>
which has no dependencies on uninitialized variables.
</p>

<p>
More precisely, a package-level variable is considered <i>ready for
initialization</i> if it is not yet initialized and either has