Release v0.19.6

Summary of Changes

Minor Changes:

• cilium-cli: bump minimum Cilium version to v1.16 (cilium/cilium#46803, @julianwiedmann)
• cilium-dbg: add table-json format to bgp/peers and bgp/routes (cilium/cilium#45858, @martonra)
• gatewayapi: add listenersets to sysdump (cilium/cilium#46851, @asauber)

CI Changes:

• cilium-cli/connectivity: explain conn-disrupt restart on failure (cilium/cilium#46854, @aanm)
• cilium-cli/connectivity: retry curl in echo-ingress-l7-named-port (cilium/cilium#46855, @aanm)
• cilium-cli/connectivity: wait for realized policy revision per endpoint (cilium/cilium#46877, @aanm)
• cilium-cli/connectivity: write JUnit report atomically (cilium/cilium#46835, @aanm)
• cilium-cli: fix EGW perf node selection, and raise scale-egw masq thresholds (cilium/cilium#46866, @aanm)
• cilium/json-mock is updated to v1.4.1 to resolve ci test flakes. (cilium/cilium#47058, @jrajahalme)
• Improved cilium-cli connectivity test resilience to transient service synchronization delays and pod-exec transport errors. (cilium/cilium#46859, @aanm)

Misc Changes:

• Add support for hybrid routing mode (routing-mode: hybrid), allowing Cilium to dynamically choose between native routing and tunnel encapsulation based on subnet topology. Traffic between pods in directly connected subnets is routed natively for improved throughput, while cross-subnet traffic is tunneled. (cilium/cilium#45001, @vanessachammas)
• chore(deps): update all-dependencies (main) (cilium/cilium#47033, @cilium-renovate[bot])
• chore(deps): update all-dependencies (main) (cilium/cilium#47107, @cilium-renovate[bot])
• chore(deps): update base-images (main) (cilium/cilium#46653, @cilium-renovate[bot])
• chore(deps): update base-images to v1.26.5 (main) (cilium/cilium#46981, @cilium-renovate[bot])
• chore(deps): update docker.io/library/golang docker tag to v1.26.4 (main) (cilium/cilium#46903, @cilium-renovate[bot])
• chore(deps): update docker.io/library/golang:1.26.5 docker digest to 079e598 (main) (cilium/cilium#47108, @cilium-renovate[bot])
• cilium-cli/connectivity: tolerate transient leader-election lock-read timeouts (cilium/cilium#47023, @aanm)
• cilium-cli: Exclude vendored leader election error (cilium/cilium#47090, @jrajahalme)
• cilium-cli: retry cilium features status pod exec on transient API server exec-proxy failures (e.g. 502 Bad Gateway, or a truncated empty response) so CI post-steps are not failed by transient infrastructure blips. (cilium/cilium#46881, @aanm)
• cilium-cli: retry transient exec errors in setup/teardown exec sites (cilium/cilium#47169, @aanm)
• cli/connectivity: always write a JUnit report, including on early failures (cilium/cilium#46990, @aanm)
• gateway-api: update TCPRoute and UDPRoute to v1 (cilium/cilium#46970, @eminaktas)
• chore(deps): update all github action dependencies by @renovate[bot] in #3259
• chore(deps): update actions/setup-go action to v6.5.0 by @renovate[bot] in #3262
• chore(deps): update docker.io/library/golang:1.26.4-alpine3.23 docker digest to 18b460d by @renovate[bot] in #3261
• chore(deps): update golangci/golangci-lint-action action to v9.3.0 by @renovate[bot] in #3263
• chore(deps): update docker/build-push-action action to v7.3.0 by @renovate[bot] in #3264
• chore(deps): update gcr.io/distroless/static:latest docker digest to d5f030c by @renovate[bot] in #3266
• chore(deps): update docker.io/library/golang docker tag to v1.26.4 by @renovate[bot] in #3267
• chore(deps): update docker/setup-buildx-action action to v4.2.0 by @renovate[bot] in #3265
• chore(deps): update gcr.io/distroless/static:latest docker digest to 9197324 by @renovate[bot] in #3268
• chore(deps): update softprops/action-gh-release digest to 3d0d988 by @renovate[bot] in #3269
• Prepare for v0.19.6 release by @michi-covalent in #3270

Full Changelog: v0.19.5...v0.19.6