Rtl8821ce stopped working after system update

General system
1

Hello,
After running sudo pacman -Syu today my wifi stopped working. My network card is Realtek 8821ce (relevant part of lspci -v included):

01:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8821CE 802.11ac PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
Subsystem: AzureWave Device 3040
Physical Slot: 0
Flags: fast devsel, IRQ 67, IOMMU group 7
I/O ports at f000 [size=256]
Memory at fea00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities:
Kernel modules: rtw88_8821ce, 8821ce

There are two interesting things to note here:

  1. I have rtw88_8821ce blacklisted, but it still shows up here (doesn’t show up under lsmod output though).
  2. inxi -N shows that neither driver is in use.

Network:
Device-1: Realtek RTL8821CE 802.11ac PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
driver: N/A

I have tried reinstalling the driver (rtl8821ce-dkms-git - both with yay and through git). I’ve used linux for the past year on this laptop and while this driver broke from time to time I always managed to get it working by reinstalling/messing with modprobe/rebooting. This time I’m completely stuck.

Any ideas how to fix it? Thanks for help in advance

Edit: added system info
https://clbin.com/sXspA
https://clbin.com/3gMg5

2

It’s quite possible that driver support was added to 5.16, so remove the DKMS driver and the blacklist file, and reboot.

3

Well, that kinda worked, but connection is very slow and unstable, nowhere near what it used to be like. Most pages don’t load at all or take a solid 30sec to load. Even just pinging my router shows massive ping/disconnects.

PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=77.7 ms
From 192.168.1.14 icmp_seq=3 Destination Host Unreachable
From 192.168.1.14 icmp_seq=4 Destination Host Unreachable
From 192.168.1.14 icmp_seq=5 Destination Host Unreachable
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=2082 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=1082 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=71.7 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=15.9 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=240 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=19.6 ms
From 192.168.1.14 icmp_seq=13 Destination Host Unreachable
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=17 ttl=64 time=1095 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=18 ttl=64 time=125 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=19 ttl=64 time=18.0 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=20 ttl=64 time=14.6 ms

Also I was using LTS kernel and on 5.15 it still doesn’t work. As a side note, I’m pretty sure i was using 5.10 LTS. Can LTS kernel change to 5.15 on it’s own? Maybe that has something to do with it?

4

Not the best choice, if the driver was installed from AUR. pacman will not update this one. You should have used sudo yay -Syu instead, if you wanted to use AUR driver.

5

As far as I know, the driver was added to kernel 5.12. There should be no need to use dkms from AUR. This one was not maintained for a few months.

1 Like
6

I got it working on 5.15 LTS kernel. Seems like doing a clean build in yay made a difference. I guess it tried to use outdated files before? Seems like this driver needed to be modified for 5.15 kernel (https://github.com/tomaspinho/rtl8821ce/issues/244), so i guess kernel update broke it.

For now it is working. Thanks for help everyone.

7

you better don*t use sudo with yay.
yay will ask for your sudo password when needed. So just run yay -Syu. And even -Syu is obsolete as a simple yay is equivalent to yay -Syu

:wink:

1 Like
8

I love bloat. :wink:

9

https://forum.endeavouros.com/search?q=RTL8821CE