Manual: 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:

       •      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	 de‐
       tection	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 neces‐
	      sarily  safe  as the internal logic may lead to potentially dangerous probes being attempted.  See the WARNING
	      section below.

       --stat Display I2C address statistics.

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	 you
       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					       September 2013					   SENSORS-DETECT(8)