SENSORS-DETECT(8)

💖 SENSORS-DETECT(8) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the sensors-detect page from the System Manager's Manual, and lemme tell you, this one is a whole journey 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

sensors-detect — detect hardware monitoring chips

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

sensors-detect [ --auto ]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so sensors-detect is an interactive program, meaning it literally walks you through the whole process of scanning your system for hardware monitoring chips (aka sensors) that are supported by libsensors(3), or honestly just by the lm_sensors tool suite in general. it's giving tour guide energy 🧚

here's the order it looks for stuff in, and yes the order matters:

• 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.

now here's the tea ☕ — those last two detection steps can cause trouble on some systems, so normally they just... don't get attempted if step two already found a Super I/O chip with complete hardware monitoring features. but you're always free to ask for all the detection steps if that's what you want, no one's stopping you 💅 that can actually 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.

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• --auto — run in automatic, non-interactive mode. it just assumes default answers to all the questions. note that this isn't necessarily safe since the internal logic may lead to potentially dangerous probes being attempted. see the WARNING section below, bestie, i'm serious.
• --stat — display I2C address statistics. slay, numbers ✨

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💀 WARNING 💀

okay this is the part where we get real. 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. which means 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:

🚨 do not run sensors-detect on production servers. and do 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. periodt.

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

sensors(1), libsensors(3)

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Frodo Looijaard and Jean Delvare — absolute icons, fr fr 💜

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and that's the whole page bestie!! this was lm-sensors 3, dated September 2013 🌸 thanks for reading, mwah, stay safe out there and don't fry ur motherboard 💅✨