Hello Unraid community,

 

I have been banging my head against the wall trying to lower the idle power consumption of my server. I have tried several things but can't seem to get anywhere. My system config is below. First off, I have a Realtek R8125 2.5gbps NIC. I have downloaded the latest Realtek plugin and according to information I found in this post

, added r8125.conf under /boot/config/modprobe.d with options r8125 aspm=1, options r8125 eee=0, but that doesn't seem to have resolved the issue either. Currently, my system will go no lower than a C3 C state. I have triple checked my BIOS settings and all seem to be in order. I updated the BIOS to the latest stable version, released on January 5th of this year. I have my drives set to spin down after 30 minutes of inactivity, no VMs running and Powertop optimizations enabled. The lowest I seem to be able to get is about 30W at idle. Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

ASROCK B660m Steel Legend
Intel i5 14600
Thermaltake Toughpower GX1 500W
2x 16GB G. Skill Ripjaw DDR4 3200
3x fans
3x 16TB Seagate Exos X18

1x 4TB Western Digital Red
1x 1TB Seagate Firecuda 530 (top nvme slot)

Unraid 6.12.10

Edited July 14, 20242 yr by obowan

Did you try optimizing with powertop --auto-tune &>/dev/null ?

It helps with most devices preventing lower C-states.

 

Been there and haven't found a solution either.

The only fix I found is staying on Unraid 6.12.3 idling at C10 at around 11 W with an i3 8100.

On anything newer including Unraid 7.0 b2 I'm stuck with C3 at around 15-20 W idle.

 

Using " lspci -vv | awk '/ASPM/{print $0}' RS= | grep --color -P '(^[a-z0-9:.]+|ASPM;|Disabled;|Enabled;)' " you can check what devices have ASPM disabled.

Edited June 7, 20251 yr by lehe

Thank you very much for the reply @lehe! I have been running that Powertop command at startup but I'm still experiencing the same issue. The lspci command you sent is very helpful tho! With the realtek plugin installed, I see that ASPM is enabled on my NIC. I see it disabled for other components on my system so I'm going to do some digging. Thanks again!

Another update on this: I've been combing through the Powertop discussion and attempted this fix to reach higher C states:

This unfortunately did not work for me either. I also played with the Realtek R8125 driver but despite getting ASPM enabled on this NIC, my speeds are greatly reduced in docker, so I had to revert back to the stock driver. I'm not really sure why this is the case, as my iperf tests show full speed but download speeds in certain containers are drastically reduced. Unfortunately, this might just be an incompatibility with my 14th gen CPU as I still can't exceed C3. With the Realtek driver installed and all powertop optimizations enabled, I have 2 devices that ultimately show ASPM disabled. Those devices are:

 

02:00.0 SATA controller: ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1061/ASM1062 Serial ATA Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 01 [AHCI 1.0])
                LnkCap: Port #1, Speed 5GT/s, Width x1, ASPM not supported
                LnkCtl: ASPM Disabled; RCB 64 bytes, Disabled- CommClk+

00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-S PCH PCI Express Root Port #6 (rev 11) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
                LnkCap: Port #6, Speed 8GT/s, Width x1, ASPM L1, Exit Latency L1 <64us
                LnkCtl: ASPM Disabled; RCB 64 bytes, Disabled- CommClk+

 

I have been in my BIOS over and over again and can't seem to get ASPM enabled for either. Based on some of the entries I read in the powertop thread, I expect this from my SATA controller, but I'm still not sure why ASPM remains disabled on my PCI bridge. I removed my nvme drive, swapped it's place on my mobo, and saw no change. I removed the USB cable for my UPS and shuffled my boot drive around to different USB ports but no change. I'm hoping there will be an update in the future that adds better ASPM support for Intel 14th gen. If anyone sees this and has any input, it is greatly appreciated.

 

Another update in case this helps anyone. I purchased the Asrock B660M Steel Legend for it's 6 SATA ports. I was browsing through my System Devices in Unraid and noticed the 4 port SATA controller is an Intel controller while the additional 2 ports are the problematic ASM1061/ASM1062. I recently switched to 4 HDDs to try and save energy, so I moved all 4 of those to the Intel controller, where as before I was split between the two SATA controllers. I found a setting in my BIOS to enable or disable the Third Party SATA 3 Controller, so I disabled it. After reenabling the Realtek driver for my R8125 2.5 gb NIC and adding the R8125.conf file at /boot/config/modprobe.d, running lspci -vv | awk '/ASPM/{print $0}' RS= | grep --color -P '(^[a-z0-9:.]+|ASPM )' shows ASPM enabled on all system devices! In Powertop, I immediately saw my machine hit C6 for the first time. After waiting for the disks to spin down, I still could only hit C6 max but I did see an average 3-5W power consumption drop. Moving my nvme drive to the chipset slot got me to C8 and see power draw lows of 22W. Still not great but I'm beginning to think this might lie with my PSU at this point. I still need to figure out why my NIC speed drops so much in Docker but this is definitely a step in the right direction. I will update if/when I get the Realtek problem solved.

Glad to hear you made some progress!

I read about the issue with different SATA controllers a few times.

One thing I found out in the meantime is that there is some kind of incompatibility with Realtek NICs with the Linux Kernel used since unraid 6.12.5.

So we can only hope that it will be fixed at some point in the future.

That is also the reason why I'm staying on 6.12.4.

Edited July 24, 20242 yr by lehe

I am closing this topic because the issue is related to the onboard Realtek R8125 ethernet adapter. I went so far as to purchase another motherboard, with an onboard Intel i225v-3 controller, which caused me even more issues. It seems almost impossible to find a combination of performance, power efficiency and stability with the current gen motherboards out there. I will be following the Realtek plugin page in the hope that a solution will be found at some point.

Edited August 13, 20241 yr by obowan

Well I thought this was done but just made a discovery: out of curiosity, I disabled Native ASPM in the BIOS on my mobo and upon rebooting my server found that ASPM shows as enabled on all my devices! I am still using the native Realtek driver, R8169, and see no loss in speeds in docker or in iperf3. That being said, I'm still stuck at C3 once my drives spin down. I then installed the R8125 driver plugin, added the r8125.conf file to /boot/config/modprobe.d, and the speed issues persist.  I am marking this new entry as the solution because ultimately, I will need an updated Realtek driver for the lower C states to be possible.

Edited August 15, 20241 yr by obowan

Hey obowan,

 

after a bit more tinkering with my asp settings and getting deeper into it I just found a solution:

 

It is possible to force enable aspm for the device by using " echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/bus/pci/drivers/r8169/0000:02:00.0/link/l1_aspm " .

 

The corresponding device number eg. "0000:02:00.0" you can get out of "lspci"

 

I am now reaching C8 again even on Unraid 7.

Hi Lehe what motherboard are you using and die this still work for you Any other requirements? Thank you

@leheI haven't checked in on this in a while but after reading your comment, I hit C8! Really appreciate the info.

 

An update: after forcing ASPM, my network speed on my server tanked. I have a 2.5Gbe hardwired connection and verified with iperf3 that my connection speed went down by about 5x. I reverted the change and saw my speeds return.

Edited April 6, 20251 yr by obowan

On 2/15/2025 at 6:07 PM, dubbly said:

Hi Lehe what motherboard are you using and die this still work for you Any other requirements? Thank you

Hey @dubbly sorry I didn't check the forum for a while.

I am using an ASUS PRIME B360M-A and now upgraded to an i7 8700k - no other requirements.

Still using the forced ASPM setting for the Realtek NIC (RTL8111H) and not having a single crash or any Network issues for a year now.

It's idling at around 16 W with a cheap power supply, four HDDs spun down, two SATA SSDs and one NVME running and a bunch of Docker containers, reaching C7 most of the Time.

Definitely some room for improvement but currently I'm not willing to spend any money for a few watts in return.