macosunix
My load average on a bunch of Macs running Catalina and Big Sur is always over 1 (1.2 -> 1.5), with just finder open, or safari idle…
On my other linux boxes raspberry pi etc, I usually see close to 0.
Why is a full core always engaged on macOS? is this a BSD thing? i.e. is 1.0 equal to 0 on linux? (or does 1 mean a full core is always used).
In my book, Adobe Flash is always the first culprit for issues with browser stability and responsiveness. Try installing ClickToFlash and see if that helps things.
You are right, vanilla Unix doesn't support this. But there is this thing called ACL (Access Control Lists) which allows for a much more granular definition of access rights than the usual user/group/world rights. From Wikipedia:
Most of the Unix and Unix-like operating systems (e.g. Linux, BSD, or Solaris) support POSIX.1e ACLs, based on an early POSIX draft that was abandoned. Many of them, for example AIX, FreeBSD, Mac OS X beginning with version 10.4 ("Tiger"), or Solaris with ZFS filesystem, support NFSv4 ACLs, which are part of the NFSv4 standard.
By default every file only has the user/group/world rights
pse@Fourecks:~/Downloads$ ls -le UML_Plakat_8_2012_Web-Download_V1.pdf
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 4914537 Jun 21 09:56 UML_Plakat_8_2012_Web-Download_V1.pdf
If you now add an additional owner
Finder automatically creates a corresponding ACL entry for this:
pse@Fourecks:~/Downloads$ ls -le UML_Plakat_8_2012_Web-Download_V1.pdf
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pse staff 4914537 Jun 21 09:56 UML_Plakat_8_2012_Web-Download_V1.pdf
0: user:jonnyenglish allow read,readattr,readextattr,readsecurity
You can also modify ACL entries directly from Terminal by using chmod (which gives you significantly more details to manipulate than the Get Info dialog in Finder). For details it's probably best to run man chmod in Terminal and read the ACL MANIPULATION OPTIONS section.
Best Answer
My load averages are routinely 0.29 so we would need to look at your build and details to know why you’re over 1.0.
The code that became macOS code measures relative task scheduling as opposed to core loading which is different than Linux I suppose. You will want to recalibrate your scripts if you take action upon this measure.
Asking why is tough since engineers committed the code and it shipped. Im not entirely sure if this is a BSD thing as much as Mach kernel, but it’s real on macOS.