SENSORS-DETECT(8)					      System Manager's Manual						 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 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 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

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