According to Raoul Boenisch / FB14 / keine Hausanschrift: While burning my CPU.
>
> On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Pawel S. Veselov wrote:
>
> > Hello, Glendon!
> >
> > On Mon, 18 Jan 1999, Glendon Gross wrote:
> >
> > >All you have to do is cat the kernel to the floppy disk, i.e.
> > >
> > >cat vmlinuz > /dev/fd0
> >
> > /dev/fd* are block devices, it is not very good to use cat, dd is much
> > better.
>
> Why is that? I never experienced any problems with cat. And when using dd,
> is it neccessary to set the bs (blocksize) to the size of disk sectors? If
> so, why?
I dont think there is much (if any differance) between the two, if 'dd' is
used without paramters. Note: i am saying "dd with NO options"
'cat' just copies the whole file in one go to where you spesifie the output
to go to, in this instance /dev/fd0, 'dd' if given options will not only
"cat" the file but will do it in chunks of bytes spesified by the given
option(s).
'dd' will also convert a file from uppercase to lower case, so realy the two
programs just read data from the input file and write it to the output file.
My opinions are based on using both.
If you were to use the program 'strace' you will see that the system calls
used are very much the same. Both programs start with
brk()
cat then uses fstat() dd dosent, (at least not when invoked without options)
Then they both do the same thing via the same system calls.
The only advantage i can see from using 'dd' in this instance would be to
use it with the -obsNNk parameter, which is write NN bytes at a time.
Note i say -obs, -bs does the same as -ibs and -obs together.
One possable advantage with using -bs could be less CPU hogging, therefor
avioding missed interrupts. Altho' that is my personal opinion. and is
possably not even an option.
>
> I can only imagine advantages when dealing with disks containing damaged
> sectors. But you can't use those disks for you kernel to boot anyway, can
> you?
So realy you should not see any noticable difference if no parameters are
given to 'dd', futher more throw damage disks away ;-)
>
> --
> Raoul Boenisch, Winkhauser Talweg 165, 45473 Muelheim an der Ruhr, Germany
> homepage: http://www.raoul.home.pages.de/ home phone: +49 208 764257
> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
--
Regards Richard.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
