The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability
of FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. 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. Some of the highlights:

- 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.

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/


Availability
-------------

FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE is now available for the amd64, i386, ia64, pc98,
and powerpc architectures. The version for the sparc64 architecture will
become available in a few days. Some of the package builds are still
in progress.

FreeBSD 7.0 can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the network;
the required files can be downloaded via FTP or BitTorrent as described in
the sections below. While some of the smaller FTP mirrors may not carry all
architectures, they will all generally contain the more common ones, such as
i386 and amd64.

MD5 and SHA256 hashes for the release ISO images are included at the
bottom of this message.

The contents of the ISO images provided as part of the release has changed
for most of the architectures. Using the i386 architecture as an example,
there are ISO images named "bootonly", "disc1", "disc2", "disc3", "livefs",
and "docs". The "bootonly" image is suitable for booting a machine to do a
network based installation using FTP or NFS. The "disc1", "disc2", and
"disc3" images are used to do a full installation that includes a basic set
of packages and does not require network access to an FTP or NFS server
during the installation. To boot into a "live CD-based filesystem" and
system rescue mode "disc1" and "livefs" are needed. The "docs" image has
all of the documentation for all supported languages. Most people will find
that "disc1", "disc2" and "disc3" are all that are needed if you want to
install some packages during the initial install, and just "disc1" if you
prefer to install packages after the initial install is completed.

FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE can also be purchased on CD-ROM from several
vendors. One of the vendors that will be offering FreeBSD 7.0-based
products is:

~ FreeBSD Mall, Inc. http://www.freebsdmall.com/


BitTorrent
----------

7.0-RELEASE ISOs are available via BitTorrent. A collection of torrent
files to download the images is available at:

http://torrents.freebsd.org:8080/


FTP
---

The primary mirror site is:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/

However before trying the primary FTP site, please check your regional
mirror(s) first by going to:

ftp://ftp.<yourdomain>.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD

Any additional mirror sites will be labeled ftp2, ftp3 and so on.

More information about FreeBSD mirror sites can be found at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html

For instructions on installing FreeBSD, please see Chapter 2 of The
FreeBSD Handbook. It provides a complete installation walk-through
for users new to FreeBSD, and can be found online at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install.html


Updating Existing Systems
-------------------------

An upgrade of any existing system to FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE constitutes
a major version upgrade, so no matter which method you use to update an
older system you should reinstall any ports you have installed on the machine.
This will avoid binaries becoming linked to inconsistent sets of libraries
when future port upgrades rebuild one port but not others that link to it.
This can be done with:

# portupgrade -faP

after updating your system. Note some of the tools to help with this
or the instructions below for FreeBSD Update are not installed by default
(e.g. portupgrade, gpg, or similar tools like portmaster).


Updates from Source
-------------------

The procedure for doing a source code based update is described in the
FreeBSD Handbook:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/synching.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html

The branch tag to use for updating the source is RELENG_7_0.


FreeBSD Update
--------------

Starting with FreeBSD 6.3, the freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary
upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems systems running earlier FreeBSD releases,
release candidates, and betas. Users upgrading to FreeBSD 7.0 from
older releases (in particular, older than 7.0-RC1) will need to
download an updated version of freebsd-update(8) that supports upgrading
to a new release.

# fetch http://people.freebsd.org/~cperciva/freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz

Downloading and verifying the digital signature for the tarball
(signed by the FreeBSD Security Officer's PGP key) is highly
recommended.

# fetch http://people.freebsd.org/~cperciva/freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz.asc
# gpg --verify freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz.asc freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz

The new freebsd-update(8) can then be extracted and run as follows:

# tar -xf freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz
# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf -r 7.0-RELEASE upgrade
# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before
continuing.

# shutdown -r now

Next, freebsd-update.sh needs to be run again to install the new userland
components, after which all ports should be recompiled to link to new
libraries:

# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf install
# portupgrade -faP

Finally, freebsd-update.sh needs to be run one last time to remove old
system libraries, after which the system should be rebooted in order
that the updated userland and ports will be running:

# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf install
# shutdown -r now

For more information, see:

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-11-11-freebsd-major-version-upgrade.html