* The following deprecated flags were removed from `kube-controller-manager`:

  * `replication-controller-lookup-cache-size`
  * `replicaset-lookup-cache-size`
  * `daemonset-lookup-cache-size`

  Don't use these flags. Using deprecated flags causes the server to print a warning. Using a removed flag causes the server to abort the startup.

- Fix performance regression in scheduler caused by frequent metric lookup on critical code path. ([#117617](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/117617), [@tosi3k](https://github.com/tosi3k)) [SIG Scheduling]

* Performs validation (when applying for example) against OpenAPI schema rather than Swagger 1.0. ([#51364](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/51364), [@apelisse](https://github.com/apelisse))
* Make all e2e tests lookup image to use from a centralized place. In that centralized place, add support for multiple platforms. ([#49457](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/49457), [@mkumatag](https://github.com/mkumatag))

* Disable proxy to loopback and linklocal ([#71980](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/71980), [@micahhausler](https://github.com/micahhausler))
* kube-scheduler: restores ability to run without authentication configuration lookup permissions ([#71755](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/71755), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))

- Fixed performance regression in scheduler caused by frequent metric lookup on critical code path. ([#117594](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/117594), [@tosi3k](https://github.com/tosi3k))

    * The vSphere cloud provider has a cleanup function with a loop,
    * inside of which a write lock was intended to prevent races against
    * VM creation, but the usage of the sync.RWMutex type is incorrect,
    * plus is placed in a defer call so the locking is effectively
    * nonexistent.  This patch adds an anonymous function call inside
    * the loop to correctly handle acquiring the write lock with deferred

- Fixes problem where invalid selector on `PodDisruptionBudget` leads to a nil pointer dereference that causes the Controller manager to crash loop. ([#98750](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/98750), [@mortent](https://github.com/mortent))

- Hostnames are now converted to lowercase before being used for node lookups in the kubernetes-worker charm. ([#65487](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/65487), [@dshcherb](https://github.com/dshcherb))

- Fixed bug in CPUManager with race on container map access ([#97427](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/97427), [@klueska](https://github.com/klueska)) [SIG Node]

- client-go discovery clients constructed using `NewDiscoveryClientForConfig` or `NewDiscoveryClientForConfigOrDie` default to rate limits that cause normal discovery request patterns to take several seconds. This is...