Ken Smith, atas nama Tim FreeBSD Release Engineering tadi malam (2007-02-27) mengumumkan tersedianya FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. Cabang jalur rilis 7-STABLE ini memperkenalkan banyak fitur baru termasuk sejumlah perbaikan terhadap fungsionalitas dari generasi sebelumnya.

Beberapa highlights antara lain:

Peningkatan performa secara dramatis dan skalabiliti untuk SMP dibuktikan dalam sejumlah adusoftware yang menunjukkan 350% peningkatan kinerja puncak (peak performance) pada beban normal dan 1500% saat beban tinggi, dibandingkan dengan kinerja generasi 6. Bila dibandingkan dengan performa terbaik dari kernel Linux (2.6.22 maupun 2.6.24), kinerja 'bayi ajaib' ini diklaim masih 15% lebih baik. Perlu ditekankan bahwa hasil yang diperoleh dari adusofware (benchmarks) bervariasi tergangung beban kerja spesifik terhadap sistem yang diuji.

Sejumlah perubahan yang memberikan kontribusi terhadap perbaikan dimaksud antara lain:

• 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.
  

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at:

• http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.0R/relnotes.html
  
• http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.0R/errata.html
  

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see:

• http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/

REVIEWS:

DistroWatch: First look at FreeBSD 7.0