Re: Power supplies and reliability

>> Yeah, I'm actually surprised the hardware hasn't caught on accordingly:
>> while it's now standard for chips to monitor their temperature (and
>> adjust their power consumption if it gets too high), I still haven't
>> seen anything comparable that would detect and report when the input
>> voltage goes out-of-range (and maybe also take steps to reduce the
>> instantaneous power consumption?).
>> Instead, we're in the dark, forced to try to avoid the problem
>> by over-provisioning the power supply and pray that it was enough.
> lm_sensors (Linux-monitoring sensors) is a free open-source software-tool
> for Linux that provides tools and drivers for monitoring temperatures,
> voltage, humidity, and fans. It can also detect chassis intrusions.

Two problems:

- AFAIK there is no standard system to actively use those voltage
  sensors to detect potentially harmful situations and take measures
  (not even logging weird voltage events seems to be standard).
- My understanding is that the problems related to power supplies which
  we'd like to catch are related to *very* transient variations on input
  voltage, and AFAIK the infrastructure around those sensors just isn't
  equipped to detect such variations.


=== Stefan