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:

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

       •      Sensors embedded in Super I/O chips.

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

       •      Hardware monitoring chips reachable over the SMBus or more generally 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 discovery  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 notably 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 detections.  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 impossible 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 afford 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