Today Tom Rhodes (trhodes@) has committed a massive patch against FreeBSD-HEAD, allowing Intel C/C++ Compiler to build kernel. This change should not change the current gcc based build infrasture.

Supporting more comilers will give users more choice. Intel’s compiler is supposed to produce better code on Intel platforms, and hence, this is supposed will be lead to performance gains if you are actually using it to compile the kernel and OpenSSL code.