The benchmarks weren't particularly well written, using lots of syscalls for timing instead of RDTSC. The impact was small compared to cache size, and the bench

The benchmarks weren't particularly well written, using lots of syscalls for timing instead of RDTSC. The impact was small compared to cache size, and the benchmark worked perfectly fine for education. I noticed a later filesystem simulation benchmark for the same class ran faster when I moved my mouse. After a few minutes of investigation, I submitted a patch to prefer /dev/urandom to /dev/random on hosts that had /dev/random.