It is my privilege and pleasure to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE. The culmination of nearly three years of work, this release starts FreeBSD on the path of advanced multiprocessor and application thread support and introduces support for the sparc64 and ia64 platforms. Among the long list of new and improved features:

UFS2, the second generation UFS filesystem, shatters the current 1TB filesystem barrier.
Background filesystem checking (bgfsck) and filesystem snapshots eliminate the need for downtime to do filesystem repair and backup tasks.
Experimental support for Mandatory Access Controls (MAC) provide an extensible and flexible means for administrators to define system security policies.
Fine-grained locking in the kernel paves the road for much higher efficiency of multi-processor systems.
Support for Bluetooth, ACPI, CardBus, IEEE 1394, and experimental hardware crypto acceleration keeps FreeBSD at the forefront of new technology.
The GCC 3.2.1 compiler provides the latest installment of the ever-improving GNU Compiler Collection.
GEOM, the extensible and flexible storage framework, and DEVFS, the device virtual filesystem, simplify storage and device management while opening the door for new enterprise storage technologies.
Support for the sparc64 and ia64 platforms expands FreeBSD's support of advanced 64-bit computing platforms.
Although FreeBSD 5.0 contains a number of new and exciting features, it may not be suitable for all users. More conservative users may prefer to continue using FreeBSD 4.X. Information on the various trade-offs involved, as well as some notes on future plans for both FreeBSD 4.X and 5.X, can be found in the Early Adopter's Guide, available here:

You can check it all out HERE