Where can I find cpu temperature and frequency without any specific command?

Question

I want to make a shell script that runs as a daemon process and every X minutes read the temperature of every cpu core to report it later with GNU plot. And here is my question, Is there any file in /sys or /proc or any other location which this info be uniformly placed across several UNIX systems (not only in Linux)?

If not, tell me at least, where can I find these files in Linux.

Answer 1

Looks at this SOa:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/15213255/438544

It mentions these three links:

• http://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/kernel/sysfs-thermal-zone.html
• http://lwn.net/Articles/268958/
• http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/thermal/sysfs-api.txt

They mention that on newer systems you should have all thermal information under:

/sys/class/thermal/thermal_zoneN/temp

where N is a number starting from 0.

On my Xubuntu 13.04, I have two:

thermal_zone0  thermal_zone1

Note that my CPU is quad-core, from cpuid:

Processor name string: AMD Phenom(tm) II N950 Quad-Core Processor

so it's not giving me temp per-core. It might be that it doesn't even have a temp sensor per-core, but I could not find more information about that. This is, however, the only location where this can be read from that I am aware of.

It is, as also mentioned by this answer on the same SOq above:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/2440544/438544

unlikely to be the same across different computers, Linux distributions, kernel versions, etc. - that is, it's unlikely going to be a one-fit-all solution here. You might need to do it in a few different ways or normalize the results if needed.