Oh yes, time has come! The long-awaited FreeBSD 7.0 operating system is finally released to the wild. This version incorporates many new features and finishes the work that has been started since FreeBSD 5.0, when a fundamentally new architecture was put in place. Today is the day the fruits of this long journey have become visible to the public, with impressing results!

A quick summary of major changes:
Drastic performance increases, especially in SMP workloads
Database benchmarks show 7.0 to be 15% faster than the best performing Linux-kernel (2.6.24) in realistic workloads
Experimental support for the Sun ZFS filesystem, bringing one of the most advanced filesystems to FreeBSD!
Support for journaling using the new geom_journal module, supports UFS
Auto-adapting network buffers and TSO/LRO support
Many drivers were re-written to be freed of the inefficient Giant-lock
New lagg-driver allows link aggregation (combine two gigabit adapters into one 2Gbps link)
The ULE process scheduler has been updated to version 3, and incorporates all the work done in the SCHED_SMP project.
The libthr threading model is now enabled by default
The freebsd-update utility allows binary upgrades
CD's are bundled with X.Org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, GNOME 2.20.2.

Get it while it's still hot:
Dutch FTP mirror of FreeBSD 7.0 i386 (32-bit)
Dutch FTP mirror of FreeBSD 7.0 amd64 (64-bit)

Other links:
FreeBSD 7.0 Release Announcement (quick summary of changes)
FreeBSD 7.0 Release Notes (full-list of changes)
FreeBSD 7.0 Hardware Notes (check if it supports your hardware)
Onlamp: What's new in FreeBSD 7.0? (in-depth article)