- Changed: default "Accept-Encoding" header removed from HTTP probes. See https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/configure-liveness-readiness-startup-probes/#http-probes ([#96127](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/96127), [@fonsecas72](https://github.com/fonsecas72)) [SIG Network and Node]

- Support more than 100 disk mounts on Windows (#105673, @andyzhangx) [SIG Storage and Windows]
- The --leader-elect* CLI args are now honored correctly in scheduler. (#106130, @Huang-Wei) [SIG Scheduling]
- The kube-proxy sync_proxy_rules_iptables_total metric now gives
  the correct number of rules, rather than being off by one.
  

### Other (Cleanup or Flake)

- Client-go header logging (at verbosity levels >= 9) now masks `Authorization` header contents ([#95316](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/95316), [@sfowl](https://github.com/sfowl)) [SIG API Machinery]

## Dependencies

### Added
_Nothing has changed._

### Bug or Regression

- Client-go: fixes potential data races retrying requests using a custom io.Reader body; with this fix, only requests with no body or with string / []byte / runtime.Object bodies can be retried ([#113933](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/113933), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt)) [SIG API Machinery]

- Client-go: Optimized leaders renewing leases by updating leader lock optimistically without getting the record from the API server first. Also, a new metric `leader_election_slowpath_total` was added to allow users to monitor how many leader elections are updated non-optimistically.

* Fix kubelet errors in AArch64 with huge page sizes smaller than 1MiB ([#78495](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/78495), [@odinuge](https://github.com/odinuge))
* kube-addon-manager has been updated to v9.0.2 to fix a bug in leader election (https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/80575) ([#80861](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/80861), [@mborsz](https://github.com/mborsz))

* Use separate client for leader election in scheduler to avoid starving leader election by regular scheduler operations. ([#53793](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/53793), [@wojtek-t](https://github.com/wojtek-t))

    * faster handoff when a leader-elected process is gracefully terminated.
* Make volume binder resilient to races between main schedule loop and async binding operation  ([#72045](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/72045), [@cofyc](https://github.com/cofyc))

### Bug or Regression

- Client-go: fixes potential data races retrying requests using a custom io.Reader body; with this fix, only requests with no body or with string / []byte / runtime.Object bodies can be retried ([#113933](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/113933), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt)) [SIG API Machinery]