Thanks, Matt -- I appreciate the time you took to respond. I *do* have control over the motherboard, so I went looking for documentation on the chipset & sensors, but there was nothing offered other than basic "How to configure the BIOS" information. Do you have any suggestions of what, specifically, I could ask the manufacturer for (if they'll even oblige me). I dug deeper into the lm-sensors code, and determined that lm-sensors is parsing a file in /sys/devices/platform/i2c-9191/9191-0290/ (and responding accordingly). Can you help me understand how this file got created there, and how it is updated (I assume the data needs to be updated in close to real-time)? Thanks again. -Ken -----Original Message----- From: Matt Roberds [mailto:mattroberds at cox.net] Sent: Friday, August 15, 2008 8:17 PM To: sensored at CubicC.com Cc: lm-sensors at lm-sensors.org Subject: Re: Single Sensor Check On Fri, 15 Aug 2008, sensored at CubicC.com wrote: > Hello, all! I need to add a check for an alarm to a single sensor in > my C program, and I'd like to do so without the overhead of calling > out to an external program and parsing its output (plus all the > error-checking, etc.). Assuming a Unix-ish environment: write a script (in shell, Perl, etc) that calls sensors for you, parses the output, and creates a short file with the information you need. Put the script in cron, and/or have it run continuously. In your C program, read in the short file (whose format you control) and act on it appropriately. Add checking to avoid race conditions, etc, but also remember that most sensors and alarms don't update all that fast; if it really does matter if you catch the alarm now or 2 seconds from now, you need a different approach. > I have been having some issues compiling lm-sensors (so that I can > step through with a debugger), so perhaps you can help me short-circuit > this process a little: You should be able to run the sensors-detect script in the lm-sensors package without compiling the entire package; this should at least tell you if the sensor chip you have is supported. > Is there a way to read the value of a sensor (all it throws is ALARM or > nothing) from somewhere (e.g. in a protected area of memory)? Yes. This is 100% dependent on the hardware you are using and will even change between different revisions of a particular motherboard. If you have control over what hardware is used, then get the data sheet for the sensor/monitoring chip being used and read it; it should describe how to access the chip. If there is an lm-sensors driver for that chip, look at it as well to see what you need to do. Matt Roberds
