The vulnerability is a memory leak that occurs when the OCFS2 filesystem performs a copy_file_range operation on the same filesystem. Kernel deallocations that should happen after a copy‑on‑write completion are omitted, leaving unreferenced 32‑byte objects in memory. Over time the leaked memory can grow large enough to exhaust kernel address space, potentially leading to system instability or panic.

Affected systems are Linux kernel deployments that contain the OCFS2 code before the fix that forces deallocations after copy‑on‑write. The problem was found in kernel 6.12.94 during local fuzzing, so any kernel version that had not yet merged the commit applying the deallocation logic remains vulnerable. Operating systems that ship the Linux kernel with OCFS2 mounts for internal or external storage are therefore at risk.

The CVSS score of 5.5 indicates moderate severity, while the EPSS score is below 1% and the vulnerability is not listed in CISA KEV, suggesting limited native exploitation risk. The weakness is a CWE‑772 unreleased resource, and exploitation would require local access to the kernel with privilege to invoke copy_file_range on a vulnerable OCFS2 volume. An attacker could trigger repeated copy_file_range operations to drain kernel memory, potentially degrading availability.