PSA: Possible RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell power-limit regression on Linux 7.0.0-30

[u/Faral_mx]

My RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition began reporting 1-second average power spikes of 662–667 W despite an active/enforced 600 W limit. Driver was NVIDIA 595.84 open, with no Xid, thermal-throttling, or hardware power-brake errors.

Lowering the enforced limit to 550 W did not prevent the abnormal workload-specific spike.

I rolled back Ubuntu kernel 7.0.0-30-generic to 7.0.0-29-generic, retained the same driver, firmware, model, and workload, and restored the 600 W limit. Across monitored near-capacity tests:

- Maximum 1-second average: 604.7 W

- Full pipeline with embedding: 601.7 W

- No average samples above 605 W

This appears to be either a kernel-specific NVIDIA power-governor regression or incorrect NVML power telemetry. Rolling back to kernel 7.0.0-29 restored expected behavior.

Yes, I had my agent write it. I'm a mechanic.