- `kubelet` now emits a metric for end-to-end pod startup latency, including image pull. ([#121041](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/121041), [@ruiwen-zhao](https://github.com/ruiwen-zhao))
- `kubelet` now exposes latency metrics of different stages of the node startup. ([#118568](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/118568), [@qiutongs](https://github.com/qiutongs))

### Documentation

- A new metric `lifecycle_handler_sleep_terminated_total` is added to record how many times LifecycleHandler sleep got unexpectedly terminated. ([#122456](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/122456), [@AxeZhan](ht...

Abdulaziz Aloqeely, Ahmad-M-Al-Khateeb, Akhil Goel, akhilgoe, Alexander Pivovarov, Amir Samani, Andrew Goodbody, Andrey Portnoy, Ashiq Imran, Ben Olson, Chao, Chase Riley Roberts, Clemens Giuliani, dependabot[bot], Dimitris Vardoulakis, Dragan Mladjenovic, ekuznetsov139, Elfie Guo, Faijul Amin, Gauri1 Deshpande, Georg Stefan Schmid, guozhong.zhuang, Hao Wu, Haoyu (Daniel), Harsha H S, Harsha Hs, Harshit Monish, Ilia Sergachev, Jane Liu, Jaroslav Sevcik, Jinzhe Zeng, Justin Dhillon, Kaixi Hou, Kanvi Khanna,...

- Fixes a bug where images pinned by the container runtime can be garbage collected by kubelet. ([#120053](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/120053), [@ruiwen-zhao](https://github.com/ruiwen-zhao)) [SIG Node]
- Ignore context canceled from validate and mutate webhook ([#120155](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/120155), [@divyasri537](https://github.com/divyasri537)) [SIG API Machinery]