- Kubeadm: remove the deprecated / NO-OP phase `update-cluster-status`...

- Faster mount detection for linux kernel 5.10+ using openat2 speeding up pod churn rates. On Kernel versions less 5.10, it will fallback to using the original way of detecting mount points i.e by parsing /proc/mounts. ([#109217](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/109217), [@manugupt1](https://github.com/manugupt1))

* Fixed binding of block PersistentVolumes / PersistentVolumeClaims when BlockVolume feature is off. ([#84049](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/84049), [@jsafrane](https://github.com/jsafrane))
* kube-scheduler now fallbacks to emitting events using core/v1 Events when events.k8s.io/v1beta1 is disabled. ([#83692](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/83692), [@yastij](https://github.com/yastij))

- Kubeadm: upgrade supports fallback to the nearest known etcd version if an unknown k8s version is passed ([#88373](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/88373), [@SataQiu](https://github.com/SataQiu)) [SIG Cluster Lifecycle]

- Added `kubectl node drain` helper callbacks `OnPodDeletionOrEvictionStarted`
  and `OnPodDeletionOrEvictionFailed`; people extending `kubectl` can use these
  new callbacks for more granularity. Deprecated the `OnPodDeletedOrEvicted`
  node drain helper callback. ([#117502](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/117502), [@adilGhaffarDev](https://github.com/adilGhaffarDev))

* Restored the ability of kubectl running inside a pod to consume resource files specifying a different namespace than the one the pod is...

  using HTTP fall back to making the request over HTTP for compatibility with
  previous releases. When this happens, a `LifecycleHTTPFallback` event is recorded
  in the namespace of the pod and a `kubelet_lifecycle_handler_http_fallbacks_total`
  metric in the kubelet is incremented. Cluster administrators can opt out of the
  expanded lifecycle handler capabilities by setting
  `--feature-gates=ConsistentHTTPGetHandlers=false` in `kubelet`.'

  - `kube-apiserver` now only aggregates openapi schemas from `/openapi/v2` endpoints of aggregated API servers. The fallback to aggregate from `/swagger.json` has been removed. Ensure aggregated API servers provide schema information via `/openapi/v2` (available since v1.10). ([#73441](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/73441), [@roycaihw](https://github.com/roycaihw))...

run inside a pod using a kubeconfig file now use the namespace specified in the kubeconfig file, instead of using the pod namespace. If no kubeconfig file is used, or the kubeconfig does not specify a namespace, the pod namespace is still used as a fallback. ([#44570](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/44570), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))

    * Fixed `kubectl cluster-info` dump to support multi-container pod. ([#44088](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/44088),...