sensors-detect

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

NAME
       sensors-detect - detect hardware monitoring chips

SYNOPSIS
       sensors-detect [ --auto ]

DESCRIPTION
       sensors-detect is an interactive program that will walk you through the
       process of scanning your system for various hardware monitoring  chips,
       or  sensors,  supported  by  libsensors(3),  or  more  generally by the
       lm_sensors tool suite.

       sensors-detect will look for the following devices, in order:

       o      Sensors embedded in CPUs, south bridges and memory controllers.

       o      Sensors embedded in Super I/O chips.

       o      Hardware monitoring chips accessed through ISA I/O ports.

       o      Hardware monitoring chips reachable over the SMBus or more  gen-
              erally any I2C bus on your system.

       As the last two detection steps can cause trouble on some systems, they
       are normally not attempted if the second detection step led to the dis-
       covery  of a Super I/O chip with complete hardware monitoring features.
       However, the user is always free to ask for all detection steps  if  so
       is his/her wish. This can be useful if a given system has more than one
       hardware monitoring chip. Some vendors are known to do this,  most  no-
       tably Asus and Tyan.

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

WARNING
       sensors-detect needs to access the hardware for most of the chip detec-
       tions.   By definition, it doesn't know which chips are there before it
       manages to identify them. This means that it can access chips in a  way
       these  chips do not like, causing problems ranging from SMBus lockup to
       permanent hardware damage (a rare case, thankfully.)

       The authors made their best to make the detection as safe as  possible,
       and  it turns out to work just fine in most cases, however it is impos-
       sible to guarantee that sensors-detect will not lock or kill a specific
       system.  So,  as  a rule of thumb, you should not run sensors-detect on
       production servers, and you should not run sensors-detect if can't  af-
       ford replacing a random part of your system. Also, it is recommended to
       not force a detection step which would have been  skipped  by  default,
       unless you know what you are doing.

SEE ALSO
       sensors(1), libsensors(3)

AUTHOR
       Frodo Looijaard and Jean Delvare

lm-sensors 3                    September 2013               SENSORS-DETECT(8)