Linux Kernel CVE-2026-72244

The affected subsystem is the Linux kernel gpu/buddy allocator, which manages contiguous GPU memory using a binary buddy allocation strategy. When a contiguous allocation cannot be satisfied on the first attempt, the try_harder fallback path searches for candidate blocks under relaxed constraints. The bug resided in the alignment enforcement step of that fallback: candidate blocks whose start offsets were not aligned to the caller's min_block_size boundary were returned without correction, rather than being realigned by freeing the misaligned run and reallocating at the next lower aligned boundary. The fix introduced in v2 of the patch corrects both the RHS and LHS candidate paths by aligning misaligned candidates down to min_block_size before returning. CWE is listed as N/A by NVD - this is a logic/alignment correctness error rather than a classical memory-safety category. The CVSS 3.1 vector AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H indicates local, low-privileged exploitation with no user interaction required. Affected kernel versions span from the introducing commit across multiple stable branches, with fixes landed in 6.12.101, 6.18.42, 7.1.5, and 7.2-rc3.