- Fixed a startup probe race condition that caused main containers to remain stuck in "Initializing" state when sidecar containers with startup probes failed initially but succeeded on restart in pods with restartPolicy=Never. ([#134800](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/134800), [@yuanwang04](https://github.com/yuanwang04)) [SIG Node and Testing]

- Revised node selection based on container image location. The kube-scheduler now considers whether nodes have the required images available for init containers, and for sidecar containers if the cluster has 'SidecarContainers' enabled. ([#123366](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/123366), [@kerthcet](https://github.com/kerthcet))