RHEL: Why does recvfrom() sometimes return EINVAL instead of ETIMEDOUT after a retransmission timeout?

Issue

• After deleting a local IP address, an application sent data to an existing connection through that IP address. Therefore TCP retransmissions were invoked, then the retransmission continued until the tcp_retries2 sysctl timeout. If finding the routing cache entry failed after tcp_retries1 boundary or after the garbage collection, this will result in the EINVAL error. After that the application called recvfrom() and the connection and got EINVAL error instead of ETIMEDOUT.