LM-Sensors Sensor-Detect Is Causing Hardware Issues

As a forewarning if you use LM-Sensors' sensor-detect program for detecting available hardware sensor/monitoring drivers of your system hardware, the open-source program is causing "serious trouble" for some newer hardware.

While on my way back to Chicago today from Phoronix @ Oktoberfest, sitting in the airport it came to mind that there hasn't been much news on LM-Sensors recently. When visiting LM-Sensors.org, I was greeted by a notable warning that could affect a number of the Phoronix readers that are generally Linux hardware enthusiasts.

It turns out that with sensors-detect there's some serious trouble on recent hardware -- namely laptops -- and the developers of LM-Sensors aren't too sue what's happening. They don't even know if the hardware troubles caused by sensors-detect are reversible but otherwise your hardware may be broken -- there's been such sensor-detect warnings in the past of issues when running the program on certain systems like ThinkPad laptops.

The hardware symptoms begin with the display starting to misbehave with either the wrong resolution or gamma factor. To try to mitigate the risk until the developers understand what's going on and can fully address the issue, they are no longer touching EDID EEPROMs inside sensors-detect and not probing graphics adapters at all unless requested by the user. For now LM-Sensors developers are asking distribution packagers to back-port these changes into their stable packages.