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