- Improved CRI handling
  - crictl is no longer required in docker-only setups.
  - Better detection of installed CRI.
  - Better output for image pull errors.
- Improved air-gapped and offline support
  - kubeadm now handles air-gapped environments by using the local client version as a fallback.
  - Some kubeadm commands are now allowed to work in a completely offline mode.
- Certificate handling improvements:

- Kubeadm: amend the node kernel validation to treat CGROUP_PIDS, FAIR_GROUP_SCHED as required and CFS_BANDWIDTH, CGROUP_HUGETLB as optional ([#96378](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/96378), [@neolit123](https://github.com/neolit123)) [SIG Cluster Lifecycle and Node]

## Changelog since v1.11.0-alpha.1

### Other notable changes

* `kubeadm upgrade plan` now accepts a version which improves the UX nicer in air-gapped environments. ([#63201](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/63201), [@chuckha](https://github.com/chuckha))

    - `apiserver_flowcontrol_demand_seats_smoothed`: Smoothed seat demands
    - `apiserver_flowcontrol_target_seats`: Seat allocation targets
    - `apiserver_flowcontrol_seat_fair_frac`: Fair fraction of server's concurrency to allocate to each priority level that can use it
    - `apiserver_flowcontrol_current_limit_seats`: current derived number of execution seats available to each priority level

because it frontends equivalent mirrors in other clouds.  Please point your clusters to the new registry going forward. \n\nAdmission/Policy integrations that have an allowlist of registries need to include `registry.k8s.io` alongside `k8s.gcr.io`.\nAir-gapped environments and image garbage-collection configurations will need to update to pre-pull and preserve required images under `registry.k8s.io` as well as `k8s.gcr.io`. ([#109938](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/109938), [@dims]...