[YUNIKORN-2870] Release notes for 1.6.0

src/pages/release-announce/1.6.0.md

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+---
+id: rn-1.6.0
+title: Release Announcement v1.6.0
+---
+
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+
+# Release Announcement v1.6.0
+We are pleased to announce that the Apache YuniKorn community has voted to release 1.6.0. 
+Apache YuniKorn is a standalone resource scheduler, designed for managing and scheduling Batch and Data workloads on container
+orchestration frameworks like Kubernetes for on-prem and on-cloud use cases.
+
+## Overview
+The Apache YuniKorn community has resolved 316 [JIRAs](https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?filter=12353274) in this release.
+
+Release manager: Peter Bacsko
+
+Release date: 2024-09-17
+
+## Highlights
+
+### Unification of Ask and Allocation
+
+YuniKorn 1.6.0 got simplified on a code level - we no longer have "Ask" objects in
+the scheduler core. A resource ask is simply an allocation without a node assigned
+to it. See [YUNIKORN-2457](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/YUNIKORN-2457) for
+details. 
+
+### Preemption hardening
+
+After a more thorough analysis of the preemption feature, we identified several use cases where
+it works either inconsistently or produces unexpected, non-intuitive results.
+See [YUNIKORN-2493](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/YUNIKORN-2493) for details.
+
+### Establish consistent usage guidelines for labels and annotations
+
+Before YuniKorn 1.6.0, labels and annotations were not used in a consistent way.
+Certain metadata existed either as a label or annotation. If it existed for both,
+the precedence was not clear. If both were defined with different values, no error
+was reported. This got fixed in [YUNIKORN-2501](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/YUNIKORN-2501).
+
+### Support for OIDC credentials
+
+In [YUNIKORN-2281](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/YUNIKORN-2281) we added support
+for OIDC user names. Previously, these got rejected in the admission controller
+because certain characters were treated as illegal. 
+
+### Improved code quality
+
+In [YUNIKORN-182](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/YUNIKORN-182) we improved the
+code quality of Yunikorn so that the Go linterns no longer complain about potential
+coding problems.
+
+Coverage of various parts of the code got significantly enhanced. See the [JIRA filter](https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?filter=12353613)
+for the list of items.
+
+### Deadlock detection, fixed potential locking issues
+
+The tool [go-deadlock](https://github.com/sasha-s/go-deadlock) has been integrated to the codebase,
+which makes it possible to detect potential deadlocks at runtime. Since this slows down the scheduler
+and increases memory usage, it's disabled by default. However, it's enabled during the unit test phase
+with "make test". See [YUNIKORN-2539](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/YUNIKORN-2539) for details.
+
+With go-deadlock, several potential deadlocks have been identified and fixed in
+[YUNIKORN-2544](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/YUNIKORN-2544).
+
+### Reproducible binaries
+
+Before YuniKorn 1.6.0, the binaries we build for YuniKorn differ from one build to the next.
+We standardized our build output so that independently built binaries from the same source code can be validated.
+See [YUNIKORN-2419](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/YUNIKORN-2419).
+
+## Incompatible changes
+
+### Removed StateAware scheduling
+
+State-aware scheduling has been removed in YuniKorn 1.6.0.
+
+### Plugin mode is deprecated
+
+From YuniKorn 1.6.0, the plugin mode is considered deprecated and no new plugin-related
+code will be added.
+
+### Fair queue sorting has changed
+
+The previous version of the fair share sorting algorithm was broken and did not return
+the ratio correctly. This is now fixed in [YUNIKORN-2678](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/YUNIKORN-2678).
+This change fundamentally affects scheduling decisions, because in each cycle the scheduler might end up choosing
+a different pending request than it did before.
+
+### Default queue is no longer set on the pod
+
+From YuniKorn 1.6.0, the admission controller no longer updates the queue label on the pod if it's unset.
+See [YUNIKORN-2711](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/YUNIKORN-2711) for details.
+
+## Credits
+The YuniKorn 1.6.0 release would not have been possible without the
+hard work of our community and we would like to thank the following
+contributors to this release:
+
+> ChenChen Lai, amikai, YuTeng Chen, Arthur Wang, Kuan-Po Tseng,
+  Craig Condit, Hsien-Cheng (Ryan) Huang, Jacob Salway, Manikandan R,
+  Michael Akinyemi, mean-world, Mit Desai, Nick Chao, Paul Santa Clara,
+  Peter Bacsko, 400Ping, Qi Zhu, rich7420, Rich Scott, ryankert, Ryan Lo,
+  SHIAO SZU CHEN, SP12893678, steinsgateted, targetoee, Tseng Hsi-Huang,
+  Tzu-Hua Lan, Wilfred Spiegelenburg, Yongjun Zhang, Yu-Lin Chen, YUN SUN