Proooobably? I've written bare-metal bootloaders for RISC-V chips (though running seL4 and not Linux) and there's a _lot_ less stuff in the startup process than on x86/x64.

That is great to hear, actually! Thank you.

It's very likely that there's a blob for the SDRAM controller. Something like this:

https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/blob/master/arch/riscv/dts/...

Also the GPU doesn't have a free driver [currently]

The GPU doesn't have a closed driver that works either.

It's been a year for the JH7110 too, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

On Vision Five 2 everything is still softpipe in the official Debian from Star Five!

On the PineTab-V NOTHING involving the 3D part of the GPU works!

YouTube works for consumption, but that's not interesting for production.

To write/film a review of a SoC with GPU without running glgears is backwards.

I think the only hope now is for the upstream to gain a working driver in a year or two.

>I think the only hope now is for the upstream to gain a working driver in a year or two.

PowerVR driver is already part of mesa3d mainline[0].

Some definitions for the variant used in JH7110 have been added recently, but it's not yet operational.

0. https://mesamatrix.net/

Seems pvr is only vulkan?

mesa3d also has Zink, which implements opengl, opencl and gles on top of vulkan.

I'm not sure I would call this thing a blob. It is not code, but configuration data.