improve idle power consumption

[stanos4]

Hi all, my first post here,

as title suggests, I'd like to troubleshoot/check what is possible on decreasing my idle / baseline power consumption.
So, just a fresh install of the PVE 8.1, and added powertop, running powertop --auto-tune, results in ~5-8W (~50%) extra in comparison to e.g. fedora 39.
Thus, I'd like to check / hear suggestions how and if it's even possible to further decrease the consumption.

Tried so far:
powertop --auto-tune --> no/very minor (<~1W) visible change
powersave cpu governor --> no visible change
lspci -vv | grep ASPM --> work in progress to compare to fedora system output, but just quickly skimming through it on both systems, both have some devices/lanes/ports reported as ASPM disabled

my system:
hp 705 g4
AMD pro 3400G
8GB (non-ecc) RAM
samsung PM951 256gb nvme
1Gbit RJ45 attached

fedora running headless with no peripherals --> 10W stable (connecting with ssh makes no impact, neither really does unplugging the network)
proxmox --> 15-20W fluctuating, unplugging network saves <1W

Thank you!

 

[Dunuin]

Disabling all onboard components you don't need?
Maybe you can undervolt your CPU?

 

[BobhWasatch]

Proxmox probably has more stuff going on at idle. Things like updating the data for the cpu, disk, and network graphs that a blank Fedora would not be doing. It might be interesting to compare Debian Bookworm and Proxmox. That would help quantify how much is attributable to Proxmox addons so you have a baseline. Then you could try disabling services you dont need to get closer to baseline.

 

[stanos4]

It might be interesting to compare Debian Bookworm and Proxmox.

thx, tried that, and it's indeed Debian itself that increases the baseline already. So I still need to do the same troubleshooting to find out how to decrease the idle.

@Dunuin - what you suggest is pretty much in place already - I'm searching to improve idle to a "known good reference" idle that I achieve pretty much out-of-box with Fedora, on the very same machine.

 

[greybeard]

Or the obvious if your use case supports it, poweroff when finished process then powerup when you need to run vm's again. WOL works on my home lab fine.

 

[stanos4]

well, decreasing my requirements and deciding for not building any server would improve it even more.
Now back to topic - I didn't pay attention to it at first, but there's something wrong with gpu related stuff. Trying to find out what to do with drivers/firmware, but they seem to be installed. I'm stuck at basic 1024x768 resolution, and trying to troubleshoot. This is (was) clean install of debian 12 with gnome. If I don't interrupt the boot process by selecting boot option menu, I even don't get any graphical output on 1 of the 2 displayports (didn't have this issue with fedora). So maybe it's something related...

 

[stanos4]

ok, so issue was solved to a large extent. I had "wrong" setting in bios, as discussed here: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=394788
changing "Option ROM settings" to "All EFI" fixed the low resolution problem, and immediately decreased power consumption by ~2W and installing powertop and tlp and running
powertop --auto-config
tlp bat

saved another few watts, so now I'm at 0-2W above fedora, i.e. on ~11W baseline, with frequent jumps to 14-16W as probably the proxmox does its magic.