.TH SENSORS-DETECT 8 "September 2013" "lm-sensors 3"
.SH NAME
sensors-detect \- detect hardware monitoring chips

.SH SYNOPSIS
.B sensors-detect [
.I --auto
.B ]

.SH 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:
.IP \(bu
Sensors embedded in CPUs, south bridges and memory controllers.
.IP \(bu
Sensors embedded in Super I/O chips.
.IP \(bu
Hardware monitoring chips accessed through ISA I/O ports.
.IP \(bu
Hardware monitoring chips reachable over the SMBus or more generally
any I2C bus on your system.
.PP
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.

.SH OPTIONS
.IP "--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.

.SH 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.

.SH SEE ALSO
sensors(1), libsensors(3)

.SH AUTHOR
Frodo Looijaard and Jean Delvare