Hi there,
I installed a consumer RTX4060 card in an ESXi host which I pass-through directly to a VM.
Now I noticed that power consumption is a bit on the high side sometimes and made the observation that whenever the VM is shut down, idle power consumption rises. As soon as I power the VM and start a workload for some seconds, power consumption goes down and stays down.
The VM is running Debian with the open drivers installed and inside the VM, a Docker container, using the nvidia environment, runs the actual workload.
nvidia-smi -i 0 -q
on the Debian VM always shows P0 if no workload has run yet. After running the first workload, P-States adjust dynamically (maybe this enables persistence mode inside the Docker container?).
Enabling persistence mode on the Debian VM using sudo nvidia-smi -pm 1
as well seems to allow the GPU to enter P8. Disabling persistence mode again, will immediately cause the GPU to stay in P0 again.
How can I force the card to enter lower power states? Do I have to install the NVidia VIB on the ESXi host to be able to achieve this while the VM is powered off? Does the VIB work with consumer cards like my RTX4060?
Best,
Florian