lm-sensors is the canonical Linux project for reading motherboard and peripheral hardware sensors—temperatures, fan speeds, voltages—and exposing them to userspace. It ships a probing utility (sensors-detect) that identifies I²C/SMBus chips and kernel drivers, then a runtime tool (sensors) that prints human-readable readings for quick diagnostics. The companion library, libsensors, gives applications a stable API to query sensor values, enabling desktop applets, monitoring daemons, and alerting systems to build on a common foundation. Configuration files map raw chip registers to friendly labels and scaling factors, so outputs reflect real hardware characteristics across many vendors. With this foundation, higher-level tools (like fancontrol or graphical monitors) can automate cooling policies and warn about thermal or power issues before they become failures.
Features
- sensors: command-line utility to display real-time hardware sensor metrics (temperature, voltage, fan speed)
- sensord: daemon that logs sensor data and triggers alerts or actions; supports RRD for visual monitoring
- Includes sample configuration files for diverse motherboards and sensor chips
- Detects necessary kernel modules and assists in auto-configuration (sensors-detect)
- Core component in system health diagnostics, embedded into most Linux distributions
- Actively maintained, with community-driven updates and issue tracking