Reduce fan speed of passthrough GPU when not in use by VMs

[firewire10000]

Hi

I have a NVIDIA T1000 GPU installed in my Dell Optiplex desktop PC and I predominately use it with my Ubuntu media server VM which I use for transcoding Jellyfin and Plex. I have followed all of the instructions to have working PCI passthrough on the VMs I can confirm that my Windows, macOS and Linux VMs work with the GPU once drivers are installed on them.

On my Ubuntu server I have installed the NVIDIA drivers from Ubuntu's repository and after a reboot the fan significantly reduces in volume. However, when this VM is not running the fan speed picks back up and considering it's idle and doing nothing I can't see why the fan needs to be that high RPM if it's not working hard. Is there a way to be able to control the fan speed when the GPU is released from the VMs?

root@media-home:~# nvidia-smi
Wed Apr  5 08:43:08 2023
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 525.89.02    Driver Version: 525.89.02    CUDA Version: 12.0     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA T1000        Off  | 00000000:00:10.0 Off |                  N/A |
| 41%   53C    P8    N/A /  50W |      1MiB /  4096MiB |      0%      Default |
|                               |                      |                  N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                  |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                  GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                   Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Many thanks,

Will

 

[leesteken]

Either rebind the GPU to a driver on the Proxmox host that can reduce the fanspeed (but your GPU probably does not have open-source drivers) or start a minimal VM that has the appropriate drivers. The latter might be the easiest as you already have VMs that work with this GPU. You might be able to automate this with hookscripts: start minimal VM on post-stop of your actual VM. Or try dropping the GPU from the PCIe bus like they do here and only rescan the bus before starting your VM but I'm not sure that will reduce the fans. Maybe there are other tricks.