1SENSORS-DETECT(8)           System Manager's Manual          SENSORS-DETECT(8)
2
3
4

NAME

6       sensors-detect - detect hardware monitoring chips
7
8

SYNOPSIS

10       sensors-detect
11
12

DESCRIPTION

14       sensors-detect is an interactive program that will walk you through the
15       process of scanning your system for various hardware monitoring  chips,
16       or  sensors,  supported  by  libsensors(3),  or  more  generally by the
17       lm_sensors tool suite.
18
19       sensors-detect will look for the following devices, in order:
20
21       ·      Sensors embedded in CPUs, south bridges and memory controllers.
22
23       ·      Sensors embedded in Super I/O chips.
24
25       ·      Hardware monitoring chips accessed through ISA I/O ports.
26
27       ·      Hardware monitoring chips reachable over the SMBus or more  gen‐
28              erally any I2C bus on your system.
29
30       As the last two detection steps can cause trouble on some systems, they
31       are normally not attempted if the second detection step led to the dis‐
32       covery  of a Super I/O chip with complete hardware monitoring features.
33       However, the user is always free to ask for all detection steps  if  so
34       is his/her wish. This can be useful if a given system has more than one
35       hardware monitoring chip. Some vendors  are  known  to  do  this,  most
36       notably Asus and Tyan.
37
38

WARNING

40       sensors-detect needs to access the hardware for most of the chip detec‐
41       tions.  By definition, it doesn't know which chips are there before  it
42       manages  to identify them. This means that it can access chips in a way
43       these chips do not like, causing problems ranging from SMBus lockup  to
44       permanent hardware damage (a rare case, thankfully.)
45
46       The  authors made their best to make the detection as safe as possible,
47       and it turns out to work just fine in most cases, however it is  impos‐
48       sible to guarantee that sensors-detect will not lock or kill a specific
49       system. So, as a rule of thumb, you should not  run  sensors-detect  on
50       production  servers,  and  you  should  not run sensors-detect if can't
51       afford replacing a random part of your system. Also, it is  recommended
52       to not force a detection step which would have been skipped by default,
53       unless you know what you are doing.
54
55

SEE ALSO

57       sensors(1), libsensors(3)
58
59

AUTHOR

61       Frodo Looijaard and Jean Delvare
62
63
64
65lm-sensors 3                     December 2008               SENSORS-DETECT(8)