lm_sensors

The lm-sensors package, version 3, provides user-space support for the hardware monitoring drivers in Linux 2.6.5 and later. For older kernel versions, you have to use lm-sensors version 2. doc Documentation. etc A sample configuration file for libsensors, and a script to convert lm-sensors version 2 configuration files to work with version 3. lib The user-space sensors support library code (libsensors). prog Several supporting programs (see below). configs Sample configurations of various boards, contributed by users of lm-sensors. Programs ( prog ) sensors-detect — A stand-alone program for detecting installed hardware and recommending specific modules to load. sensors — A console tool to report sensor readings and set new sensor limits. sensord — A daemon to watch sensor values and log problems. It includes RRD support. All configuration files should now be imported from the old www.lm-sensors.org website, however additional information about the origin of the configuration files can be found on the old site (archived). Please contribute back a configuration of your board so other users with the same hardware won't need to recreate it again and again. To find out what hardware you have, just run sensors-detect as root. Most modern mainboards incorporate some form of hardware monitoring chips. These chips read things like chip temperatures, fan rotation speeds and voltage levels. There are quite a few different chips which can be used by mainboard builders for approximately the same results. Laptops, on the other hand, rarely expose any hardware monitoring chip. They often have some BIOS and/or ACPI magic to get the CPU temperature value, but that's about it. For such laptops, the lm-sensors package is of no use ( sensors-detect will not find anything), and you have to use acpi instead. This package doesn't contain chip-specific knowledge. It will support all the hardware monitoring chips your kernel has drivers for. In other words, if you find out that you have unsupported hardware (e.g. sensors-detect told you so) then it means that you need a more recent kernel, or you even need to wait for a new kernel driver to be written. Updating the lm-sensors package itself will not help. The kernel drivers communicate their information through the /sys interface. Because every motherboard is different, the drivers always advert the measurements at their pins. This means that the values they report are not always immediately relevant to you. They have to be labelled properly, and sometimes they must be scaled to correspond to real-world values. libsensors is a (shared or static) library of access functions. It offers a simple-to-use interface for applications to access the sensor chip readings and configure them as you like. It has a configuration file where you can put all the motherboard-specific labels and conversion rules. That way, all applications do not need to duplicate the effort and can simply link with libsensors and work out of the box. This package contains an example console program that reports all current sensor values. This program is called sensors . You can use it as a reference implementation for more intricate programs. It also contains a daemon watching for sensor values, logging alarms and feeding an RRD database with the sensor measurements. This package does not contain a nice graphical monitor. See the following projects: GNOME Sensors Applet PowerTOP Psensor s-tui lm-sensors is blamed for all kinds of problems on a regular basis. While it is always possible that lm-sensors does in fact have a problem, almost every time the problem will be elsewhere. The most likely culprit for a problem is one of the kernel drivers providing data to lm-sensors or, rather, the sensors command (and libsensors). If you encounter problems, the following tests are recommended. 1. Check enabled sensors with the sensors command. Observe and, if there are errors, write down your test steps and report. 2. If any probl