The mystery of lm-sensors

[Andy Green]

Timothy Murphy wrote:

> Does anyone understand the output of "sensors"
> under the lm-sensors program?

If you read the docs for lm_sensors you can see that the interpretation 
it does on the raw reading from the temperature sensor is grossly 
different depending on the type on sensor, the motherboard, phase of 
moon and so on, and there is nothing to check you have the correct 
sensor approximation or to calibrate it.

It's better to see if you can get the temperature from /proc/acpi, where 
the BIOS on the motherboard (AIUI) has done the conversion to 
centigrade.  At least the BIOS has a better chance to match what sensor 
is on the motherboard.

On this laptop for example

$ cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ00/temperature
temperature:             52 C

The TZ00 or whatever will depend on your BIOS, in fact the whole 
thermal_zone stuff might be absent (as might /proc/acpi if you turned it 
off).

-Andy