In the last episode (Mar 27), Ronald F. Guilmette said: > I've never used any FreeBSD memstick image before, but now I have reason > to do so. > > I'm reading the instructions for creating a bootable memstick that are > located on this page: > > http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/announce.html > > which include the following example of how to perform the copy: > > # dd if=FreeBSD-9.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/da0 bs=10240 > conv=sync > > Question: > > Why exactly is "conv=sync" is there? > > Question: > > Why exactly is the "bs=10240" is there? Wouldn't the default of 512 > do just as well?
It looks like someone just copied a dd commandline from somewhere else, maybe something to do with tar files (since tar defaults to a 10k blocksize when writing to tape). conv=sync isn't needed since the source file is already a multiple of the target device blocksize (512 bytes), and bs=64k would be much faster when writing to cheap flash devices like USB sticks since they don't have a write cache and individual writes are slowish. -- Dan Nelson dnel...@allantgroup.com _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"