Catalina 10.15.6 is prone to kernel panics from a memory leak

There have been recent reports that the macOS Catalina 10.15.6 update can result in kernel panics. This appears to be common among those who run some virtualisation products such as VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox, but I believe this may be a more general problem which could affect any Mac which is left running much of the time.

Many of those using VMWare Fusion 11.5.5 or Virtualbox 6.0.24 who leave their Windows VMs running for long periods have suffered kernel panics, which are discussed in depth here. The conclusion is that this is due to a memory leak in one of the kernel extensions which was updated in the 10.15.6 update, probably Sandbox.kext (com.apple.security.sandbox).