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bug#9734: [solaris] `dd if=/dev/urandom of=file bs=1024k count=1' gets a
From: |
Eric Blake |
Subject: |
bug#9734: [solaris] `dd if=/dev/urandom of=file bs=1024k count=1' gets a file of 133120 bytes |
Date: |
Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:14:15 -0600 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.23) Gecko/20110928 Fedora/3.1.15-1.fc14 Lightning/1.0b3pre Mnenhy/0.8.4 Thunderbird/3.1.15 |
tag 9734 notabug
thanks
On 10/12/2011 02:22 AM, Clark J. Wang wrote:
I'm not sure if it's a bug but it's not reasonable to me. On Solaris 11
(SunOS 5.11 snv_174, i86pc):
$ uname -a
SunOS sollab-242.cn.oracle.com 5.11 snv_174 i86pc i386 i86pc
$ pkg list gnu-coreutils
NAME (PUBLISHER) VERSION
IFO
file/gnu-coreutils 8.5-0.174.0.0.0.0.504
i--
$ /usr/gnu/bin/dd if=/dev/urandom of=file bs=1024k count=1
0+1 records in
Notice that this means you read a partial record - read() tried to read
1024k bytes, but the read ended short at only 133120 bytes.
0+1 records out
And because you didn't request dd to group multiple short reads before
doing a full write, you got a single (short) record written.
I'm new to Solaris but I've never seen this problem whe I use Linux so it
really suprises me.
Solaris and Linux kernels differ on when you will get short reads, and
magic files like /dev/urandom are more likely to display the issue than
regular files. That said, Linux also has the "problem" of short reads;
it's especially noticeable when passing the output of dd to a pipe.
You probably wanted to use this GNU extension:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=file bs=1024k count=1 iconv=fullblock
where the iconv flag requests that dd pile together multiple read()s
until it has a full block, so that you no longer have a partial block
output.
I found this in the man page of /dev/urandom on Solaris: "The limitation per
read for /dev/random is 1040 bytes. The limit for /dev/urandom is (128 *
1040 = 133120)." That seems to be the reason but I think dd should handle
that and check the return value of the read() system call and make sure
1024k bytes have really been read from /dev/urandom.
Only if the iconv=fullblock flag is specified, since it is a violation
of POSIX to do more than one read() without an explicit flag requesting
multiple reads per block.
--
Eric Blake address@hidden +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org