Re: BUG in 2.4.0: dd if=/dev/random of=out.txt bs=10000 count=100

John Heffner (jheffner@psc.edu)
Sat, 13 Jan 2001 00:08:06 -0500 (EST)


> dd says it completes happily even when copying from
> random. 0+100 records in, 0+100 records out. It

This means that dd completed 100 reads, and none of them were of the
requested length (10000 bytes).

> takes about thirty seconds to finish on the dual
> gigahertz processor intel box I'm using to test it,
> which implies it's actually performing the truly
> impressive waste of CPU cycles I'm requesting from it.
> I'm just not getting the data in my file.

/dev/random generates (hopefully) truly random values, and relies on
receiving interrupts. It doesn't spend very many CPU cycles. For most
purposes, /dev/urandom is adequate, and will be much faster for such large
quantities of data.

-John

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