### Bug or Regression

- Fixes a race condition in the iptables mode of kube-proxy in 1.27 and later
  that could result in some updates getting lost (e.g., when a service gets a
  new endpoint, the rules for the new endpoint might not be added until
  much later). ([#122757](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/122757), [@hakman](https://github.com/hakman)) [SIG Network]

For more information and for updates on resolution of this issue, see [#51899](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/51899).

 - CSINode initialization does not crash kubelet on startup when APIServer is not reachable or kubelet has not the right credentials yet. ([#89589](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/89589), [@jsafrane](https://github.com/jsafrane)) [SIG Storage]

- Fixes issue [#68899](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/68899) where pods might schedule on an unschedulable node. ([#68984](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/68984), [@k82cn](https://github.com/k82cn))

### Not Very Notable (that is, non-user-facing)

 - CSINode initialization does not crash kubelet on startup when APIServer is not reachable or kubelet has not the right credentials yet. ([#89589](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/89589), [@jsafrane](https://github.com/jsafrane)) [SIG Storage]

"imagePullPolicy" option in the init configuration file, that gets forwarded to kubelet static pods to control pull policy for etcd and control plane images. This option allows for precise image pull policy specification for master nodes and thus for more tight control over images. It is useful in CI environments and in environments, where the user has total control over master VM templates (thus, the master VM templates can be preloaded with the required Docker images for the control plane services). ([...

- Overall, enable the feature of `PreferNominatedNode` will  improve the performance of scheduling where preemption might frequently happen, but in theory, enable the feature of `PreferNominatedNode`, the pod might not be scheduled to the best candidate node in the cluster. ([#93179](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/93179), [@chendave](https://github.com/chendave)) [SIG Scheduling and Testing]

### Bug or Regression

- Fixes a race condition in the iptables mode of kube-proxy in 1.27 and later
  that could result in some updates getting lost (e.g., when a service gets a
  new endpoint, the rules for the new endpoint might not be added until
  much later). ([#122815](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/122815), [@wedaly](https://github.com/wedaly)) [SIG Network]

    * action required: Cloud providers other than GCE might want to update their deployments or sample yaml files to reuse the role created via add-on.

### Other notable changes

* Pod priority and preemption is now enabled by default. Even if you don't plan to use this feature, you might need to take some action immediately after upgrading. In multi-tenant clusters where not all users are trusted, you are advised to create appropriate quotas for two default priority classes, system-cluster-critical and system-node-critical, which are...