| 1 | .TH SENSORS-DETECT 8 "December 2008" "lm-sensors 3" |
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| 2 | .SH NAME |
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| 3 | sensors-detect \- detect hardware monitoring chips |
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| 4 | |
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| 5 | .SH SYNOPSIS |
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| 6 | .B sensors-detect |
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| 7 | |
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| 8 | .SH DESCRIPTION |
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| 9 | sensors-detect is an interactive program that will walk you through the |
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| 10 | process of scanning your system for various hardware monitoring chips, |
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| 11 | or sensors, supported by libsensors(3), or more generally by the lm_sensors |
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| 12 | tool suite. |
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| 13 | |
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| 14 | sensors-detect will look for the following devices, in order: |
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| 15 | .IP \(bu |
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| 16 | Sensors embedded in CPUs, south bridges and memory controllers. |
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| 17 | .IP \(bu |
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| 18 | Sensors embedded in Super I/O chips. |
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| 19 | .IP \(bu |
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| 20 | Hardware monitoring chips accessed through ISA I/O ports. |
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| 21 | .IP \(bu |
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| 22 | Hardware monitoring chips reachable over the SMBus or more generally |
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| 23 | any I2C bus on your system. |
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| 24 | .PP |
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| 25 | As the last two detection steps can cause trouble on some systems, they |
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| 26 | are normally not attempted if the second detection step led to the |
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| 27 | discovery of a Super I/O chip with complete hardware monitoring features. |
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| 28 | However, the user is always free to ask for all detection steps if so is |
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| 29 | his/her wish. This can be useful if a given system has more than one |
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| 30 | hardware monitoring chip. Some vendors are known to do this, most notably |
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| 31 | Asus and Tyan. |
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| 32 | |
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| 33 | .SH WARNING |
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| 34 | sensors-detect needs to access the hardware for most of the chip detections. |
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| 35 | By definition, it doesn't know which chips are there before it manages to |
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| 36 | identify them. This means that it can access chips in a way these chips do |
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| 37 | not like, causing problems ranging from SMBus lockup to permanent hardware |
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| 38 | damage (a rare case, thankfully.) |
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| 39 | |
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| 40 | The authors made their best to make the detection as safe as possible, and |
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| 41 | it turns out to work just fine in most cases, however it is impossible to |
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| 42 | guarantee that sensors-detect will not lock or kill a specific system. So, |
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| 43 | as a rule of thumb, you should not run sensors-detect on production servers, |
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| 44 | and you should not run sensors-detect if can't afford replacing a random |
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| 45 | part of your system. Also, it is recommended to not force a detection step |
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| 46 | which would have been skipped by default, unless you know what you are doing. |
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| 47 | |
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| 48 | .SH SEE ALSO |
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| 49 | sensors(1), libsensors(3) |
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| 50 | |
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| 51 | .SH AUTHOR |
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| 52 | Frodo Looijaard and Jean Delvare |
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