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I wonder if Illumos / SmartOS and OpenIndiana continued with the principle of least surprise via their ancestry chain, or whether they also moved to a "system" load view like Linux.

It's great that design decisions and thinking from decades past can be dug out and examined by complete strangers.

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Its called POLA in the FreeBSD world. Principle of least astonishment. So this exists outside solaris too. :)

I've always seen POLA as "principle of least authority" in an OS research context, just fyi.

I think the phrase has probably been mutated many times by various groups.

Of course, at this point, most people will be astonished when their Solaris (or Solaris-derived) or FreeBSD system shows CPU load instead of system load, given that most *ix exposure now happens via Linux.

Anecdotally, people whose first ix exposure is via Linux are still astonished that the load average doesn't mean CPU load.

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