unfortunately no easy way to check CPU load with the install initrd... However, I noticed that dd'ing /dev/urandom to a file went much much quicker. I think it must have something to do with this being an ancient 1997 vintage hard disk. hdparm says dma is off and I wasn't able to turn it on. Maybe it just doesn't do dma, or maybe it doesn't matter.
Bernie and John D: no luck with bs=512 or bs=512k. Tried a bunch of different values; only small differences. /dev/zero it is. Hopefully this won't let the bad guys get the recipe to the egg salad, the egg salad so good you could plotz. (obscure movie reference challenge) thanks Judah Rob Sherwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Seemed to go a bit quicker with /dev/zero but not all that much. > > I would check your cpu load. Using /dev/urandom might be cpu bound > :-( Basically it md5 hashes the contents of the entropy pool over and > over again. Honestly, /dev/zero is fine.. frankly, the fact that it's > an ext3 file system is probably sufficient to stop most people :-) > > - Rob > . >
