- `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),...

- Fixes a bug where images pinned by the container runtime can be garbage collected by kubelet. ([#120054](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/120054), [@ruiwen-zhao](https://github.com/ruiwen-zhao)) [SIG Node]

- 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]

- Fixes a bug where images pinned by the container runtime can be garbage collected by kubelet. ([#120055](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/120055), [@ruiwen-zhao](https://github.com/ruiwen-zhao)) [SIG Node]

release contains contributions from many people at Google, as well as:

Aiden Grossman, Akash Patel, Akhil Goel, Alexander Pivovarov, Andrew Goodbody, Ayan Moitra, Ben Barsdell, Ben Olson, Bhavani Subramanian, Boian Petkantchin, Bruce Lai, Chao Chen, Christian Steinmeyer, cjflan, David Korczynski, Donghak Park, Dragan Mladjenovic, Eli Kobrin, Fadi Arafeh, Feiyue Chen, Frédéric Bastien, guozhong.zhuang, halseycamilla, Harshavardhan Bellamkonda, James Ward, jameshollyer, Jane Liu, johnnkp,...