One more data point here is that uutils yes can be even faster than GNU yes by taking advantage of Linux's vmsplice syscall: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils

One more data point here is that uutils yes can be even faster than GNU yes by taking advantage of Linux's vmsplice syscall: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/blob/main/src/uu/yes/src/splice.rs https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/blob/main/src/uu/yes/src... On my system it manages 20GB/s vs 6 GB/s (piping through pv into /dev/null).