1SENSORS-DETECT(8)           System Manager's Manual          SENSORS-DETECT(8)
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NAME

6       sensors-detect - detect hardware monitoring chips
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SYNOPSIS

10       sensors-detect [ --auto ]
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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.
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19       sensors-detect will look for the following devices, in order:
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21       ·      Sensors embedded in CPUs, south bridges and memory controllers.
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23       ·      Sensors embedded in Super I/O chips.
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25       ·      Hardware monitoring chips accessed through ISA I/O ports.
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27       ·      Hardware monitoring chips reachable over the SMBus or more  gen‐
28              erally any I2C bus on your system.
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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.
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OPTIONS

40       --auto Run  in  automatic, non-interactive mode. Assume default answers
41              to all questions. Note that this isn't necessarily safe  as  the
42              internal  logic  may  lead to potentially dangerous probes being
43              attempted. See the WARNING section below.
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WARNING

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

64       sensors(1), libsensors(3)
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AUTHOR

68       Frodo Looijaard and Jean Delvare
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72lm-sensors 3                    September 2013               SENSORS-DETECT(8)