^{Tip of the hat to @gniourf_gniourf for his input.}

Note: This answer does not answer the original question, but complements the existing, helpful answers by comparing performance.

Solutions are compared in terms of execution speed only – memory requirements are not taken into account (they vary across solutions and may matter with large repeat counts).

Summary:

• If your repeat count is small, say up to around 100, it’s worth going with the Bash-only solutions, as the startup cost of external utilities matters, especially Perl’s.
  • Pragmatically speaking, however, if you only need one instance of repeating characters, all existing solutions may be fine.
• With large repeat counts, use external utilities, as they’ll be much faster.
  • In particular, avoid Bash’s global substring replacement with large strings
    (e.g., ${var// /=}), as it is prohibitively slow.

The following are timings taken on a late-2012 iMac with a 3.2 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU and a Fusion Drive, running OSX 10.10.4 and bash 3.2.57, and are the average of 1000 runs.

The entries are:

• listed in ascending order of execution duration (fastest first)
• prefixed with:
  • M … a potentially multi-character solution
  • S … a single-character-only solution
  • P … a POSIX-compliant solution
• followed by a brief description of the solution
• suffixed with the name of the author of the originating answer

---

[M, P] printf %.s= [dogbane]:                           0.0002
[M   ] printf + bash global substr. replacement [Tim]:  0.0005
[M   ] echo -n - brace expansion loop [eugene y]:       0.0007
[M   ] echo -n - arithmetic loop [Eliah Kagan]:         0.0013
[M   ] seq -f [Sam Salisbury]:                          0.0016
[M   ] jot -b [Stefan Ludwig]:                          0.0016
[M   ] awk - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]:   0.0019
[M, P] awk - while loop [Steven Penny]:                 0.0019
[S   ] printf + tr [user332325]:                        0.0021
[S   ] head + tr [eugene y]:                            0.0021
[S, P] dd + tr [mklement0]:                             0.0021
[M   ] printf + sed [user332325 (comment)]:             0.0021
[M   ] mawk - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]:  0.0025
[M, P] mawk - while loop [Steven Penny]:                0.0026
[M   ] gawk - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]:  0.0028
[M, P] gawk - while loop [Steven Penny]:                0.0028
[M   ] yes + head + tr [Digital Trauma]:                0.0029
[M   ] Perl [sid_com]:                                  0.0059

• The Bash-only solutions lead the pack – but only with a repeat count this small! (see below).
• Startup cost of external utilities does matter here, especially Perl’s. If you must call this in a loop – with small repetition counts in each iteration – avoid the multi-utility, awk, and perl solutions.

---

• Large repeat count: 1000000 (1 million)

[M   ] Perl [sid_com]:                                  0.0067
[M   ] mawk - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]:  0.0254
[M   ] gawk - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]:  0.0599
[S   ] head + tr [eugene y]:                            0.1143
[S, P] dd + tr [mklement0]:                             0.1144
[S   ] printf + tr [user332325]:                        0.1164
[M, P] mawk - while loop [Steven Penny]:                0.1434
[M   ] seq -f [Sam Salisbury]:                          0.1452
[M   ] jot -b [Stefan Ludwig]:                          0.1690
[M   ] printf + sed [user332325 (comment)]:             0.1735
[M   ] yes + head + tr [Digital Trauma]:                0.1883
[M, P] gawk - while loop [Steven Penny]:                0.2493
[M   ] awk - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]:   0.2614
[M, P] awk - while loop [Steven Penny]:                 0.3211
[M, P] printf %.s= [dogbane]:                           2.4565
[M   ] echo -n - brace expansion loop [eugene y]:       7.5877
[M   ] echo -n - arithmetic loop [Eliah Kagan]:         13.5426
[M   ] printf + bash global substr. replacement [Tim]:  n/a

• The Perl solution from the question is by far the fastest.
• Bash’s global string-replacement (${foo// /=}) is inexplicably excruciatingly slow with large strings, and has been taken out of the running (took around 50 minutes(!) in Bash 4.3.30, and even longer in Bash 3.2.57 – I never waited for it to finish).
• Bash loops are slow, and arithmetic loops ((( i= 0; ... ))) are slower than brace-expanded ones ({1..n}) – though arithmetic loops are more memory-efficient.
• awk refers to BSD awk (as also found on OSX) – it’s noticeably slower than gawk (GNU Awk) and especially mawk.
• Note that with large counts and multi-char. strings, memory consumption can become a consideration – the approaches differ in that respect.

---

Here’s the Bash script (testrepeat) that produced the above.
It takes 2 arguments:

• the character repeat count
• optionally, the number of test runs to perform and to calculate the average timing from

In other words: the timings above were obtained with testrepeat 100 1000 and testrepeat 1000000 1000

#!/usr/bin/env bash

title() { printf '%s:\t' "$1"; }

TIMEFORMAT=$'%6Rs'

# The number of repetitions of the input chars. to produce
COUNT_REPETITIONS=${1?Arguments: <charRepeatCount> [<testRunCount>]}

# The number of test runs to perform to derive the average timing from.
COUNT_RUNS=${2:-1}

# Discard the (stdout) output generated by default.
# If you want to check the results, replace '/dev/null' on the following
# line with a prefix path to which a running index starting with 1 will
# be appended for each test run; e.g., outFilePrefix='outfile', which
# will produce outfile1, outfile2, ...
outFilePrefix=/dev/null

{

  outFile=$outFilePrefix
  ndx=0

  title '[M, P] printf %.s= [dogbane]'
  [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
  # !! In order to use brace expansion with a variable, we must use `eval`.
  eval "
  time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
    printf '%.s=" {1..$COUNT_REPETITIONS} >"$outFile"
  done"

  title "[M   ] echo -n - arithmetic loop [Eliah Kagan]'
  [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
  time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
    for ((i=0; i<COUNT_REPETITIONS; ++i)); do echo -n =; done >"$outFile"
  done


  title '[M   ] echo -n - brace expansion loop [eugene y]'
  [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
  # !! In order to use brace expansion with a variable, we must use `eval`.
  eval "
  time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
    for i in {1..$COUNT_REPETITIONS}; do echo -n =; done >"$outFile"
  done
  "

  title '[M   ] printf + sed [user332325 (comment)]'
  [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
  time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
    printf "%${COUNT_REPETITIONS}s" | sed 's/ /=/g' >"$outFile"
  done


  title '[S   ] printf + tr [user332325]'
  [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
  time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
    printf "%${COUNT_REPETITIONS}s" | tr ' ' '='  >"$outFile"
  done


  title '[S   ] head + tr [eugene y]'
  [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
  time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
    head -c $COUNT_REPETITIONS < /dev/zero | tr '\0' '=' >"$outFile"
  done


  title '[M   ] seq -f [Sam Salisbury]'
  [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
  time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
    seq -f '=' -s '' $COUNT_REPETITIONS >"$outFile"
  done


  title '[M   ] jot -b [Stefan Ludwig]'
  [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
  time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
    jot -s '' -b '=' $COUNT_REPETITIONS >"$outFile"
  done


  title '[M   ] yes + head + tr [Digital Trauma]'
  [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
  time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
    yes = | head -$COUNT_REPETITIONS | tr -d '\n'  >"$outFile"
  done

  title '[M   ] Perl [sid_com]'
  [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
  time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
    perl -e "print \"=\" x $COUNT_REPETITIONS" >"$outFile"
  done

  title '[S, P] dd + tr [mklement0]'
  [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
  time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
    dd if=/dev/zero bs=$COUNT_REPETITIONS count=1 2>/dev/null | tr '\0' "=" >"$outFile"
  done

  # !! On OSX, awk is BSD awk, and mawk and gawk were installed later.
  # !! On Linux systems, awk may refer to either mawk or gawk.
  for awkBin in awk mawk gawk; do
    if [[ -x $(command -v $awkBin) ]]; then

      title "[M   ] $awkBin"' - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]'
      [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
      time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
        $awkBin -v count=$COUNT_REPETITIONS 'BEGIN { OFS="="; $(count+1)=""; print }' >"$outFile"
      done

      title "[M, P] $awkBin"' - while loop [Steven Penny]'
      [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
      time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
        $awkBin -v count=$COUNT_REPETITIONS 'BEGIN { while (i++ < count) printf "=" }' >"$outFile"
      done

    fi
  done

  title '[M   ] printf + bash global substr. replacement [Tim]'
  [[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
  # !! In Bash 4.3.30 a single run with repeat count of 1 million took almost
  # !! 50 *minutes*(!) to complete; n Bash 3.2.57 it's seemingly even slower -
  # !! didn't wait for it to finish.
  # !! Thus, this test is skipped for counts that are likely to be much slower
  # !! than the other tests.
  skip=0
  [[ $BASH_VERSINFO -le 3 && COUNT_REPETITIONS -gt 1000 ]] && skip=1
  [[ $BASH_VERSINFO -eq 4 && COUNT_REPETITIONS -gt 10000 ]] && skip=1
  if (( skip )); then
    echo 'n/a' >&2
  else
    time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do 
      { printf -v t "%${COUNT_REPETITIONS}s" '='; printf %s "${t// /=}"; } >"$outFile"
    done
  fi
} 2>&1 | 
 sort -t$'\t' -k2,2n | 
   awk -F $'\t' -v count=$COUNT_RUNS '{ 
    printf "%s\t", $1; 
    if ($2 ~ "^n/a") { print $2 } else { printf "%.4f\n", $2 / count }}' |
     column -s$'\t' -t