If you can overwrite 8 bytes of kernel memory, you can do absolutely anything to the machine. You don't have to cause it to panic, you can instead modify some function to run your code first.
I couldn't say for sure, but this would probably allow someone to become root on the machine from a local user account.
I couldn't say for sure, but this would probably allow someone to become root on the machine from a local user account.
But at least it is not exploitable remotely.