lm-sensors/lm-sensors
Lm Sensors
Lm-sensors is a collection of system utilities and background daemons designed to monitor physical hardware components on Linux operating systems. It provides command-line interfaces to query motherboard monitoring chips, displaying real-time metrics such as temperatures, voltage levels, and fan speeds. The software interacts directly with operating system kernel drivers to retrieve raw hardware measurements and register states.
The platform automatically discovers hardware monitoring chips by scanning system management buses like I2C and SMBus, matching discovered components against a database of known device signatures, and recommending required kernel modules. It translates raw register numbers into readable physical units using user-defined scaling factors, arithmetic formulas, and label mappings from configuration files. Additionally, it includes programmatic interfaces that enable external applications to access normalized hardware measurements and sensor states.
The capability set includes background daemon polling for periodic metric sampling, alarm evaluation, and historical data logging. It supports modular plugin loading to accommodate different chip families and proprietary vendor monitoring interfaces, alongside system diagnostics for configuring operational safety limits.
Features
- Hardware Sensor Monitoring - Reads live temperatures, voltage levels, and fan speeds from physical components and reports collected data.
- Kernel-Mode Sensor Drivers - Directly communicates with underlying operating system kernel drivers to retrieve raw hardware measurements.
- Hardware Daemons - Runs a background service that periodically records hardware sensor measurements and logs anomalies.
- Kernel Module Identification - Scans installed hardware to identify monitoring chips and recommend appropriate kernel modules.
- Bus-Scanning Chip Detectors - Probes system management buses like I2C and SMBus to automatically discover hardware monitoring chips.
- Hardware Sensor APIs - Provides programmatic APIs enabling external applications to access normalized hardware measurements and sensor states.
- Module Recommendation Utilities - Scans installed hardware to identify monitoring chips and recommend the specific kernel modules needed.
- Plugin-Based Architectures - Loads external library backends dynamically to support different chip families and proprietary vendor interfaces.
- Background Service Daemonization - Runs a background daemon that periodically samples live metrics, evaluates alarms, and writes historical data.
- Configuration Value Translators - Applies user-defined scaling factors and formulas from configuration files to transform raw register numbers.
- Hardware Monitoring Utilities - Scans installed hardware to identify monitoring chips and recommend appropriate kernel modules.
- Raw Metric Translators - Normalizes and scales raw measurements using configuration rules to present user-friendly labels.
- System Diagnostics - Queries motherboard chips to display current metrics in the console and configure operational safety limits.
