- Static pods were taking extra time to be restarted after being updated.  Static pods that are waiting to restart were not correctly counted in `kubelet_working_pods`. ([#116995](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/116995), [@smarterclayton](https://github.com/smarterclayton)) [SIG Node]

SIG Node iterated on the ability to support more workloads with better performance and improved reliability.  Alpha features were improved around hardware accelerator support, device plugins enablement, and cpu pinning policies to enable us to graduate these features to beta in a future release.  In addition, a number of reliability and performance enhancements were made across the node to help operators in production.

### OpenStack

([#59666](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/59666), [@mtaufen](https://github.com/mtaufen))

* [GCP kube-up.sh] Variables that were part of kube-env that were only used for kubelet flags are no longer being set, and are being replaced by the more portable mechanism of the kubelet configuration file. The individual variables in the kube-env metadata entry were never meant to be a stable interface and this release note only applies if you are depending on them. ([#60020](https://github.com/k...

- Fixes a bug where a partial EndpointSlice update could cause node name information to be dropped from endpoints that were not updated. ([#108203](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/108203), [@robscott](https://github.com/robscott)) [SIG Network]

* 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.

* The following deprecated flags were removed from `kubelet`:

  - When registering with a 1.17+ API server, a CustomResourceDefinition conversion webhook can now request that only `v1` ConversionReview requests be sent to them. Previously, conversion webhooks were required to support receiving `v1beta1` ConversionReview requests as well for compatibility...

- Fixed a bug where aggregator_unavailable_apiservice metrics were reported for deleted apiservices. ([#96421](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/96421), [@dgrisonnet](https://github.com/dgrisonnet)) [SIG API Machinery and Instrumentation]

- Static pods were taking extra time to be restarted after being updated.  Static pods that are waiting to restart were not correctly counted in `kubelet_working_pods`. ([#116995](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/116995), [@smarterclayton](https://github.com/smarterclayton)) [SIG Node]

    *   reflector_watch_duration_seconds
    *   reflector_watches_total
    * While this is a backwards-incompatible change, it would have been impossible to setup reliable monitoring around these metrics since the labels were not stable. 
* Fix keymutex issues which may crash in some platforms. ([#74386](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/74386), [@danielqsj](https://github.com/danielqsj))



# v1.12.6

### SIG Network

For 1.13, the areas of focus were in IPv6, DNS improvements and some smaller items:
CoreDNS is now the default cluster DNS passing all of the scale/resource usage tests