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

[John Heffner]

> 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