I don't expect any improvement here: it still needs Radeon blobs (VGA ROM and
microcode), the devices available in Europe will be expensive, code needed
for them while released won't be contributed upstream, there will be no
English documentation, so no one will have a Loongson 3B device nor port a
free distro to it. (There are minor improvements, like SPI flash for boot
firmware.)
The NVIDIA order situation is bad: only Nouveau replaces nonfree firmware
used for GPUs, if the VGA ROM was replaced (I don't know if only data or code
too is needed from it), there would be a fully free Loongson 3 system. I
think the blob issue for Loongson was not that the NVIDIA driver is nonfree,
but that NVIDIA wouldn't port it to MIPS. I don't think blobs are an issue
for a company distributing the Flash player, Radeon VGA ROMs or microcode.
Radeon blobs used on RS780 might be easy to replace: for the VGA ROM, there
is more register documentation than for newer chipsets, the RadeonHD driver
supports modesetting on a similar chip without the blob (and the whole issue
is easy: replace interpreted code in a known instruction set, with a free
interpreter); microcode has unknown instruction sets while the Freedreno
project has partially guessed the R600 microcode format (and there are simple
ways to get more information). We don't have enough developers or they
prefer Intel systems.
Lack of English documentation is why I'm completely not interested in
Loongson 1C, even if SBCs with it were as popular as Raspberry Pi here.
