Fedora on an AMD Athlon 64 (3200+) machine

[Philip Prindeville]

Timothy Murphy wrote:

>I have lm-sensors installed, and have run detect-lmsensors ;
>after this the command "sudo sensors" yields
>-------------------------------------
>[tim at blanche ~]$ sudo sensors
>w83697hf-isa-0290
>Adapter: ISA adapter
>VCore:     +1.50 V  (min =  +1.71 V, max =  +1.89 V)       ALARM
>+3.3V:     +3.34 V  (min =  +3.14 V, max =  +3.47 V)
>+5V:       +5.03 V  (min =  +4.76 V, max =  +5.24 V)
>+12V:     +11.07 V  (min = +10.82 V, max = +13.19 V)
>-12V:      +0.14 V  (min = -13.18 V, max = -10.80 V)       ALARM
>-5V:       +5.10 V  (min =  -5.25 V, max =  -4.75 V)       ALARM
>V5SB:      +5.64 V  (min =  +4.76 V, max =  +5.24 V)       ALARM
>VBat:      +0.06 V  (min =  +2.40 V, max =  +3.60 V)       ALARM
>fan1:        0 RPM  (min =   44 RPM, div = 128)              ALARM
>fan2:     1520 RPM  (min = 1506 RPM, div = 4)
>temp1:       +24°C  (high =   +53°C, hyst =    -7°C)   sensor = thermistor
>temp2:     +52.0°C  (high =   +80°C, hyst =   +75°C)   sensor = thermistor
>alarms:
>beep_enable:
>          Sound alarm enabled
>-------------------------------------
>
>I don't really understand this.
>Are there really 2 fans, one of which seems always to be off?
>I guess I must read the "lm-sensors" documentation ...
>
>  
>

Sigh.

This is unfortunately fairly normal.

There are no standards for sensors on a motherboard.  There is a
huge number of permutations of formulas for normalizing sensor
(thermistor, etc) readings, and the /etc/sensors.conf has a
remarkably slim chance of being correct.

The proper thing to do would be for a standard to be developed
for describing the sensors on a motherboard, and then having
different OSes able to import that definition (either from a .inf file
with the M/B manufacturer would furnish with their product, or
or better yet from querying BIOS for it).

As it is now, it's providing in a format that only Windows seems
to handle.

To further muddy the waters, a single M/B might be manufactured
in several runs (batches), each built using whatever parts (popcorn
logic like thermistors, etc) happen to be cheapest on the given day
that the factory reorders (one of the darker sides of "just-in-time"
inventories) such parts.

If you have a fairly common motherboard (I've forgotten which one
you said it was), then a quick googling of the motherboard's name,
part number, and the phrase "/etc/sensors.conf" might turn up a
config file that someone reverse-engineered (which is a tricky,
unreliable, and time wasting process).

That a lot of off-shore M/B manufacturers are that clueless is
to be expected; that Intel, AMD, Asus, Dell, HP, and other
major manufacturers haven't come up with a portable
description of sensor data (which isn't that challenging a
problem!) is pretty pathetic.

The format of /etc/sensors.conf is (though somewhat limited
and doesn't easily extend to support exotic board layouts or
architectures) ugly but functional... and most importantly, not
intrinsically tied to any OS.  It could be cleaned up, formalized,
made extensible... and pushed as a defacto standard for
manufacturers to support.

Then again, pigs could start flying out of my bunghole...

-Philip