affinity/anti-affinity](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/assign-pod-node/) and **[beta]** [pod affinity/anti-affinity](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/assign-pod-node/). Node affinity/anti-affinity allow you to specify rules for restricting which node(s) a pod can schedule onto, based on the labels on the node. Pod affinity/anti-affinity allow you to specify rules for spreading and packing pods relative to one another, across arbitrary topologies (node, zone, etc.) These...

- Added new option to the `InterPodAffinity` scheduler plugin to ignore existing
  pods` preferred inter-pod affinities if the incoming pod has no preferred inter-pod
  affinities. This option can be used as an optimization for higher scheduling throughput
  (at the cost of an occasional pod being scheduled non-optimally/violating existing
  pods preferred inter-pod affinities). To enable this scheduler option, set the

resources of running and terminating pods when deciding to accept new pods, since terminating pods are still holding on to those resources. This stricter handling may surface to end users as pod rejections when creating pods that are scheduled to mostly full nodes that have other terminating pods holding the resources the new pods need. The most likely error would be a pod set to `Failed` phase with reason set to `OutOfCpu` or `OutOfMemory`, but any resource on the node that has some fixed limit (including...

- Added support to the scheduler to start using QueueingHint registered for Pod/Updated event to determine whether unschedulable Pods update make them schedulable, when the feature gate `SchedulerQueueingHints` is enabled.
  Previously, when unschedulable Pods are updated, the scheduler always put Pods back to activeQ/backoffQ. But, actually not all updates to Pods make Pods schedulable, especially considering many scheduling constraints nowadays are immutable.

  Similarly you can also access  kubelet's `/pods` endpoint to fetch a list of Pods bound to that node by granting the caller `nodes/pods` permission in RBAC.
  Similarly you can also access kubelet's `/configz` endpoint to fetch kubelet's configuration by granting the caller `nodes/configz` permission in RBAC.

- There is now support for collecting pod logs under `/var/log/pods/NAMESPACE_NAME_UID` to stackdriver with `k8s_pod` resource type. ([#74502](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/74502), [@Random-Liu](https://github.com/Random-Liu))

- Fix a bug that Pods could stuck in the unschedulable pod pool 
  if they're rejected by PreEnqueue plugins that could change its result by a change in resources apart from Pods.
  
  DRA plugin is the only plugin that meets the criteria of the bug in in-tree, 
  and hence if you have `DynamicResourceAllocation` feature flag enabled, 

* **[Pod priority and preemption](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/pod-priority-preemption/) is now enabled by default.** Note that this means that pods from *any* namespace can now request priority classes that compete with and/or cause preemption of critical system pods that are already running. If that is not desired, disable the PodPriority feature by setting `--feature-gat...

- Fixed a regression that could incorrectly reject pods with OutOfCpu errors if they were rapidly scheduled after other pods were reported as complete in the API. The Kubelet now waits to report the phase of a pod as terminal in the API until all running containers are guaranteed to have stopped and no new containers can be started.  Short-lived pods may take slightly longer (~1s) to report Succeeded or Failed after this change. ([#108723](https://...

- Critical pods can now be created in namespaces other than kube-system. To limit critical pods to the kube-system namespace, cluster admins should create an admission configuration file limiting critical pods by default, and a matching quota object in the `kube-system` namespace permitting critical pods in that namespace. See https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/policy/resource-quotas/#limit-priority-clas...