Gateway API v1.6.0 shipped on June 30 and the SIG Network write-up landed on August 3, and the CI-visible change is straightforward: TCPRoute and UDPRoute are now v1 resources on the Standard channel, and the v1alpha2 versions of both are deprecated on the same release. Cluster manifests that still reference gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1alpha2 for either route type will keep working for now, but the countdown to their removal has started.
What graduated, and what moved
Per the release post, TCPRoute (GEP-2644) and UDPRoute (GEP-2645) both crossed from Experimental into Standard, tracked under the v1 API version alongside the existing HTTPRoute and TLSRoute lineup. The functional model is what SIG Network describes as raw L4 routing: TCPRoute and UDPRoute match on protocol and port only, with no HTTP-layer awareness. A route can pin to a single listener via sectionName, or, if sectionName is omitted, attach to every listener on the parent Gateway that matches the route's protocol. That is the whole matching surface. There is nothing to configure at the request layer, because there is no request layer.
The other structural change is that experimental resources are moving to a distinct API group, gateway.networking.x-k8s.io, with an X prefix on the type names. The Standard channel keeps gateway.networking.k8s.io. The point of the split, per the post, is to make the experimental-versus-standard boundary a property of the API group rather than a channel flag on the CRD bundle. Anything you install from the experimental group is meant to be visibly experimental in the manifest itself.
