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 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.

       --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
       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)