This is the first release from the 7-STABLE branch which introduces many new features along with many improvements to functionality present in the earlier branches.

FreeBSD 7.0 features:

• Dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability shown by various database and other benchmarks, in some cases showing peak performance improvements as high as 350% over FreeBSD 6.X under normal loads and 1500% at high loads. When compared with the best performing Linux kernel (2.6.22 or 2.6.24) performance is 15% better. Results are from benchmarks used to analyze and improve system performance, results with your specific work load may vary. Some of the changes that contribute to this improvement are:
  
  • The 1:1 libthr threading model is now the default.
  • Finer-grained IPC, networking, and scheduler locking.
  • A major focus on optimizing the SMP architecture that was put in place during the 5.x and 6.x branches.

  Some benchmarks show linear scaling up to 8 CPUs. Many workloads see a significant performance improvement with multicore systems.

• The ULE scheduler is vastly improved, providing improved performance and interactive response (the 4BSD scheduler is still the default for 7.0 but ULE may become the default for 7.1).
• Experimental support for Sun's ZFS filesystem.
• gjournal can be used to set up journaled filesystems, gvirstor can be used as a virtualized storage provider.
• Read-only support for the XFS filesystem.
• The unionfs filesystem has been fixed.
• iSCSI initiator.
• TSO and LRO support for some network drivers.
• Experimental SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) support (FreeBSD's being the reference implementation).
• Much improved wireless (802.11) support.
• Network link aggregation/trunking (lagg(4)) imported from OpenBSD.
• JIT compilation to turn BPF into native code, improving packet capture performance.
• Much improved support for embedded system development for boards based on the ARM architecture.
• jemalloc, a new and highly scalable user-level memory allocator.
• freebsd-update(8) provides officially supported binary upgrades to new releases in addition to security fixes and errata patches.
• X.Org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, GNOME 2.20.2.
• GNU C compiler 4.2.1.
• BIND 9.4.2.