Intel Arc A580 idle power regression with kernel 7.0.14-20/22-pve

[seylon79]

Hi,

I've noticed what appears to be a kernel regression affecting the idle power consumption of an Intel Arc A580.

Hardware:

• Proxmox VE 9.2
• AMD Ryzen 5 9600X
• Intel Arc A580
• Arc is using the i915 driver

I originally noticed that the Arc was drawing significantly more power than expected at idle. I tested this by booting different installed Proxmox kernels.

Results:

Kernel	Arc A580 idle power
7.0.14-16-pve	~6 W
7.0.14-20-pve	~40–50 W
7.0.14-22-pve	~40–50 W

The difference is reproducible. I can boot 7.0.14-16-pve and the Arc returns to approximately 6 W idle. Booting 7.0.14-20-pve or 7.0.14-22-pve causes the idle consumption to increase substantially.

I also disabled GPU monitoring in Beszel (SKIP_GPU=true) during the testing, so the higher power draw isn't being caused by Beszel polling the GPU.

I verified the power difference using the i915 energy counter rather than relying only on monitoring software. On 7.0.14-22-pve, the counter increased by approximately 3.0 kJ in about one minute, corresponding to roughly 50 W.

Interestingly, I also noticed different behavior from the AMD iGPU between the kernels, although I haven't investigated that separately.

For now I've pinned the host back to 7.0.14-16-pve, where the Arc returns to its normal ~6 W idle consumption.

Is this a known regression in the newer 7.0 kernels, particularly around i915/DRM power management?

Thanks!