Previously, on low-memory systems (such as low-memory high-performance infrastructure, or HPC, nodes or virtual machines), depmod could use excessive amount of memory. As a consequence, the depmod process was killed by the OOM (out of memory) mechanism, and the system was unable to boot. With this update, the free() function is correctly used on several places in the code so that depmod's memory consumption is reduced.

Previously, if the "override" keyword was present in the depmod.conf file without any parameters specified, the depmod utility terminated unexpectedly with a segmentation fault. A patch has been applied to ensure that the depmod utility no longer crashes and a syntax warning is displayed instead.

This update adds the "backports" directory to the search path in the depmod.conf file, which is necessary to support integration of the compat-wireless package into kernel packages.