On Friday 21 August 2009, Raj Mathur wrote:
On Friday 21 Aug 2009, Arun Khan wrote:
On Thursday 20 Aug 2009, jtd wrote:
On Thursday 20 August 2009, Raj Mathur wrote:
Hell, I've done "cat /vmlinuz > /dev/fd0" to make bootable floppies in my misspent youth!
What a waste. You could have used dd and had a life too ;-).
Would dd be any faster than cat in writing the file to /dev/fd0?
Possibly, since dd supports the bs= option so you can override the default system block buffer size. That may make a difference when copying to/from slow media. On disk, it doesn't seem to make any difference -- if anything, dd seems to be a bit slower than cat on disk to disk copy, and uses up to 4 times more CPU.
dd is slower. 375 MB/s v/s 1.29GB/s. approx 3.4 times slower. Cat does not check for anything at all. But even i am suprised at the 3x difference.
Regards,
-- Raju (who uses find...|xargs instead of find... -exec to save precious CPU cycles) -- Raj Mathur raju@kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves