NAME

       sensors-detect - detect hardware monitoring chips

SYNOPSIS

       sensors-detect

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.

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