https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107168
--- Comment #2 from Paul Menzel pmenzel+bugs.freedesktop@molgen.mpg.de --- (In reply to Alex Deucher from comment #1)
You need the firmware for initialization.
What’s the technical reason for this. Why can’t certain parts of the hardware be initialized later on?
Even if the firmware were open source, it would still needs to be loaded so you'd still need firmware images.
Understood.