FreeBSD Version 7.0 Announced by FreeBSD Project

The FreeBSD Project made an announcement today about  the release of FreeBSD Version 7.0. FreeBSD 7.0 promises to be the release system administrators have long been waiting for, and includes numerous improvements for enhanced networking, multimedia, security, and storage. The highly-scalable ZFS file system from Solaris is implemented in FreeBSD 7.0. Also significant in this release are SMP and kernel scheduler improvements that enhance performance and the introduction of the FreeBSD GEOM Storage Virtualization Layer called "gvirstor".

Other highlights of the FreeBSD 7.0 release include:

    * GEOM virtual storage device
    * GEOM file system-independent journaling
    * GEOM storage failover between multiple devices
    * TSO (TCP Segmentation Offload) and LRO (Large Receive Offload) support for several network drivers with performance increased by 25% to 108%
    * New optimized sendfile (2) implementation and other TCP/IP optimizations
    * TCP buffer auto scaling for improved transfer rates
    * Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP; 802.1w)
    * Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP)
    * Link aggregation and link failover interface from OpenBSD
    * Interrupt filtering
    * Linux 2.6 binary compatibility
    * New ULE 2.0/3.0 scheduler
    * Improved accounting file format
    * New efficient memory file-system, tmpfs, from NetBSD
    * Solaris and Mac OS X compatible fine-grained and configurable security event auditing for live system monitoring, intrusion detection, and postmortem analysis.
    * New fine-grained root privilege separation capabilities
    * A new more-scalable concurrent malloc (3) implementation for improved performance (jemalloc)


Robert Watson, FreeBSD Core Team Member, says: "FreeBSD 7.0 is a truly stellar release, bringing to fruition our 8-year SMPng project and blowing away the competition on multi-processor database performance". "It isn't just about databases, though: with network features including the reference SCTP implementation, a parallel directly-dispatched network stack, vendor-supported and vendor-optimized 10gbps network drivers, and storage features such as iSCSI and ZFS, this is an incredible release -- and one that we're very proud of."