SENSORS-DETECT(8)                                                                                              SENSORS-DETECT(8)



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 hard-
       ware 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 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  detec-
       tion  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, caus-
       ing 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



lm-sensors 3                                              December 2008                                        SENSORS-DETECT(8)