* Fix metrics API group name in audit configuration ([#53493](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/53493), [@piosz](https://github.com/piosz))
* Use separate client for leader election in scheduler to avoid starving leader election by regular scheduler operations. ([#53793](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/53793), [@wojtek-t](https://github.com/wojtek-t))

- The deprecated flag `--lock-object-namespace` and `--lock-object-name` have been removed from kube-scheduler. Please use `--leader-elect-resource-namespace` and `--leader-elect-resource-name` or ComponentConfig instead to configure those parameters. ([#119130](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/119130), [@SataQiu](https://github.com/SataQiu)) [SIG Scheduling]

request alternate representations of normal Kubernetes objects by passing an `Accept` header like `application/json;as=Table;g=meta.k8s.io;v=v1beta1` or `application/json;as=PartialObjectMetadata;g=meta.k8s.io;v1=v1beta1`.  Older servers will ignore this representation or return an error if it is not available.  Clients may request fallback to the normal object by adding a non-qualified mime-type to their `Accept` header like `application/json` - the server will then respond with either the alternate...

- Adds feature gate `NodeLogQuery` which provides cluster administrators with a streaming view of logs using kubectl without them having to implement a client side reader or logging into the node. ([#96120](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/96120), [@LorbusChris](https://github.com/LorbusChris))

- Allow CSI drivers to just run offline expansion tests (#102740, @gnufied) [SIG Storage and Testing]
- Bump klog to v2.9.0, fixing log lines that render as byte arrays (#105407, @ehashman) [SIG Architecture, CLI, Cloud Provider, Cluster Lifecycle, Instrumentation and Storage]
- Fix overriding logs files on reboot. (#105614, @rphillips) [SIG Node]

- Fixed a scheduler panic due to internal cache inconsistency ([#71063](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/71063), [@Huang-Wei](https://github.com/Huang-Wei))
- Report kube-scheduler unhealthy if leader election is deadlocked. ([#71085](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/71085), [@bsalamat](https://github.com/bsalamat))

* Use separate client for leader election in scheduler to avoid starving leader election by regular scheduler operations. ([#53793](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/53793), [@wojtek-t](https://github.com/wojtek-t))

### Bug or Regression

- Client-go: fixes potential data races retrying requests using a custom io.Reader body; with this fix, only requests with no body or with string / []byte / runtime.Object bodies can be retried ([#113933](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/113933), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt)) [SIG API Machinery]

- Client-go: Optimized leaders renewing leases by updating leader lock optimistically without getting the record from the API server first. Also, a new metric `leader_election_slowpath_total` was added to allow users to monitor how many leader elections are updated non-optimistically.

* Fix kubelet errors in AArch64 with huge page sizes smaller than 1MiB ([#78495](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/78495), [@odinuge](https://github.com/odinuge))
* kube-addon-manager has been updated to v9.0.2 to fix a bug in leader election (https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/80575) ([#80861](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/80861), [@mborsz](https://github.com/mborsz))