Power Consumption on Atom C3558

[thomas-hn]

Hi,

currently I'm running OPNsense bare-metal on an Atom C3558 and the system consumes around 20 watt all the time.
I would like to virtualize OPNsense via Proxmox on the same hardware to be more flexible with configuration changes and I also want to play with pfSense.

Therefore, does someone have an information about the power consumption of a lightly loaded Proxmox running on an Atom C3558?
My question is mainly related to the fact that the utilization of power saving options is usually not preferred on Proxmox system. Will the system consume much more power when running Proxmox, compared to the bare-metal OPNsense (which uses power savings).

Thanks,

Thomas

 

[LnxBil]

Therefore, does someone have an information about the power consumption of a lightly loaded Proxmox running on an Atom C3558?

I have no real numbers for you, but I'm running also a mini-itx with an APU (not atom), 16 GB-RAM with two enterprise ssds with around 9-12W. I have not tested in going further down with the wattage, but even if it would be the case, the benefits in running PVE outweight anything else.

My question is mainly related to the fact that the utilization of power saving options is usually not preferred on Proxmox system.

Wasn't this mainly a problem with keeping the clock at the same speed? I'm also using dynamic scaling on my systems and it still works.

Will the system consume much more power when running Proxmox, compared to the bare-metal OPNsense (which uses power savings).

Just try it out. Depending on the optimizations OPNSense has, it may be less or more.

 

[Dunuin]

Previously PVE was using "performance" as CPU governor but meanwhile (since PVE 7.1?) "schedutil" should be the default governor. So PVE will clock down when the performance isn't needed.

And PVE is no appliance, its a full Linux OS where you can do everything you want. Even if you run a old PVE installation you can just enter cronteb -e and add a line like @reboot echo "schedutil" | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor and your CPU governor will be automatically switched to "shedutil" on boot.

See here for infos on the available governors: https://kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cpu-freq/governors.txt

 

[LnxBil]

I have no real numbers for you, but I'm running also a mini-itx with an APU (not atom), 16 GB-RAM with two enterprise ssds with around 9-12W.

While checking my govenor, I just found out that the APU was the old machine. The new/actual machine that is running is a J4205 with ondemand govenor and clocking at 800 MHz most of the time.