The flaw resides in the RDS networking stack of the Linux kernel. During the cancellation of a reconnect worker the reconnect‑pending flag is not cleared if the worker has not yet been scheduled. Consequently the flag remains set permanently, causing the kernel to believe a reconnection is always pending. This state corruption can prevent new reconnection attempts and exhaust reconnection resources, effectively blocking RDS traffic and rendering applications that depend on RDS unavailable.

All Linux kernel releases that contain the RDS reconnection code prior to the incorporation of commit 14eae556 are affected. The patch was subsequently applied to current stable kernels; any running kernel lacking that commit remains vulnerable. No explicit version range is supplied, so any pre‑fix kernel should be considered at risk.

The CVSS score of 7.5 indicates a high severity impact, while an EPSS score of less than 1% reflects a low likelihood of exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog. Exploitation would require the ability to influence the RDS protocol, typically implying local or privileged access on the host. If triggered repeatedly, the stuck internal flag could lead to a full denial of service for all RDS connections on the affected system.