lm-sensors

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.