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.
Sejumlah perubahan yang memberikan kontribusi terhadap perbaikan 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.