Um, actually, that's not a function of the kernel version. It must be a function of the version of dd, since the only thing that dd does is call read() and write() in a loop (in the absence of errors, anyway). If dd prints out anything when it finishes, that's something that it does on its own.

Also, while something like dd if=blah of=blah ; date will tell you what time the program completed, time dd if=blah of=blah will give you lots of info about how long dd took. (That's information like how much total wall time it took, how many CPU-seconds were spent in userspace, and how many CPU-seconds were spent in kernel space. The sum of the second and third are not necessarily equal to the first, because of multi-processor machines.)