Increased Power Consumption After Upgrading Proxmox from 8.4 to 9.1

[glcos]

Hi everyone,

today I upgraded one of my Proxmox virtual hosts from version 8.4 to 9.1. The upgrade itself went smoothly and all VMs are running normally. However, I noticed a small but measurable increase in power consumption after the upgrade.

Under identical conditions (same VMs, same workload, same hardware, same ambient temperature), the host now consistently draws about 1–2 watts more than before. The total power usage is normally around 38 watts, so the change is noticeable on my monitoring graph.

I’m attaching a picture that shows the difference in consumption before and after the upgrade.



Has anyone else observed similar behavior with Proxmox 9.1? Could this be related to kernel changes, drivers, power management defaults, or something else?
My machine is a home lab based on Odroid H4 Plus with Alder Lake N97 CPU with 32GB DDR5 RAM. The machine is running with scaling governor set to powersave.

Thanks for any insights!

 

[gfngfn256]

I observed the opposite, a drop of about 2W, as in my upgrade post.
It is probably very relative to the specific HW & work-load in question.

 

[uzumo]

Such adjustments may be made, so fluctuations may occur.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.14-Power-Management

https://community.frame.work/t/kernel-6-14-minimum-cpu-frequency-changed/66781

 

[glcos]

This is what I see on my system:

root@pve01-a:~# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq
800000
root@pve01-a:~# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_min_freq
800000

I believe the CPU minimum frequency cannot be lowered beyond this without causing system instability.
Anyway, I’ll leave it as it is and just deal with the cooling fans kicking in more frequently.