FreeBSD 8.0 is available for download on the ftp servers. Please note that at the time as we are writing this, there's not yet an official statement on the FreeBSD website.
This release brings an overhauled USB stack, a new partition class called slices and NFSv4.
The old USB stack had problems when you disconnected devices before they'd have been unmounted and freezed the machine. This is now past. The new stack is backwards compatible with old drivers.
NFS version 4 brings new features like a stateful protocol, performance improvements and stronger security through ACLs and strong authentication. The brand new NFS lock manager runs in the kernel mode, operates multithreaded and has deadlock detection.
Despite ISO images for the platforms amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, powerpc, sparc64 an image for USB sticks will be there. Great stuff, thanks to everyone that worked on the new release! ■