- Fixed #118052: nodeAffinity on pods can change prior to scheduling gates being removed even when podSpec.affinity is nil in the initial spec, this matches the 1.28 behavior to allow consistent integrators to be written. ([#118199](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/118199), [@aleskandro](https://github.com/aleskandro)) [SIG Apps, Scheduling and Testing]

* Advanced audit policy now supports matching subresources and resource names, but the top level resource no longer matches the subresouce. For example "pods" no longer matches requests to the logs subresource of pods. Use "pods/logs" to match subresources. ([#48836](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/48836), [@ericchiang](https://github.com/ericchiang))

- The "value" part in the `wait --for=jsonpath='{expression}'[=value]` is now
  optional. If the value is not provided i.e., the command looks like `wait --for=jsonpath='{expression}'`
  then the wait condition is interpreted as matched when the expression returns
  *any* single JSON value like object or a literal. ([#118160](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/118160), [@minherz](https://github.com/minherz))

- Kube-apiserver: ensures the namespace of objects sent to admission webhooks matches the request namespace. Previously, objects without a namespace set would have the request namespace populated after mutating admission, and objects with a namespace that did not match the request namespace would be rejected after admission. ([#94...

- Kube-scheduler now retries scheduling Pods rejected by the PodTopologySpread plugin when related Pods are created, deleted, updated, or when a node matches the specified topologyKey. ([#122195](https://github.com/k...

  The scheduling hints allow the scheduler to only retry scheduling a `Pod`
  that was previously rejected by the `NodeAffinity` plugin if a new `Node` or a `Node` update matches the `Pod`'s node affinity. ([#119155](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/119155), [@carlory](https://github.com/carlory))
- `kubeadm`: promoted feature gate `EtcdLearnerMode` to `beta`. Learner mode for