Linux Lenovo WiFi Card Linux Not Working, rtl8821ce, Slow Boot Process, A Job is running 1 minute 30 seconds.

A start job is running for sys subsystem/net/devices/wlp2s0… 1 minute 30 seconds…

I started seeing these boot errors after updating recently, around 5.6.x Kernel version.

It seems that during update, the DKMS module for my unsupported Lenovo WiFi card (still not in kernel) wasn’t being rebuilt.

If you already have rtl8821ce installed via the Git, then you should try to download the latest version.

Later, I was trying to use /dev/net/tun and was getting additional errors.

Solution: Reinstall rtl8821ce using yay.

Do not attempt this if you do not have Ethernet or mobile hot-spot available  because you will not be able to connect to WiFi during the reinstallation.

$ dkms status
# rtl8821ce, 1.0.5.r65.g55b90f4: added
# rtl8821ce, 1.0.5.r76.g7c4f827: added

Two versions of the rtl8821ce dkms module are in my dkms status, however neither are installed.

# you will lose wifi when you do this, warning.
sudo pacman -R rtl8821ce-dkms-git

# reboot then,
reboot

# ...reinstall
yay rtl8821ce-dkms-git

After I reinstalled rtl8821ce-dkms-git from the AUR, my output was fixed:

$ dkms status
# rtl8821ce, 1.0.5.r65.g55b90f4: added
# rtl8821ce, 1.0.5.r76.g7c4f827: added
# rtl8821ce, 1.0.5.r95.g69765eb, 5.6.13-arch1-1, x86_64: installed

WiFi is back, and the long start errors have gone, thank you Tomas !

Reinstalling rtl8821ce fixed the TUN errors

TUN/TAP Errors Lenovo WiFi

grep CONFIG_TUN /usr/src/linux/.config

You should see the following:

CONFIG_TUN=m

If you do, that means tun is a compiled module. This is normal

dmesg | grep TUN
# [   12.3456] tun: Universal TUN/TAP device driver, 1.6

This means TUN is working fine.

Now, turn it on:

sudo modprobe tun

If your output is FATAL, then you need to reinstall the rtl8821ce WiFi card

modprobe: FATAL: Module tun not found in directory /lib/modules/5.6.11-arch1-1

Turn it on:

sudo insmod /lib/modules/5.6.13-arch1-1/kernel/drivers/net/tun.ko.xz

insmod: ERROR: could not insert module /lib/modules/5.6.13-arch1-1/kernel/drivers/net/tun.ko.xz: Invalid module format

Now, in my case the reason was the following:

I reinstalled rtl8821ce-dkms-git using yay.

After removing this DKMS module, and rebooted, the problem was not fixed.

So I reinstalled the dkms module and now now I have WiFi.

Is TUN fixed too?

sudo modprobe tun

Bingo! TUN back!

Leave a comment if you need help 🙂