Totally blob free? Unfortunately not: "We aren’t touching the modem’s ADSP firmware, because in addition to the inherent difficulties that come with it, modifying the ADSP firmware could lead to problems with RF regulations or certifications."

The ADSP firmware is the firmware that does all of the heavy lifting for physical communications.

Close enough for me. I don't know how (un)reasonable it may be, but I think the "put it on a read-only chip and run on a 'secondary processor'" maneuver would be enough for fsf ryf certification[1]. The way it is now is free and open enough for me nevertheless.

[1] https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-solving-the-first-fsf-ryf-hurd...

It may have 150 binaries on the ARM side, but most are a) not used, b) don't don anything interesting or very involved c) some are FOSS already, like busybox, or have some code available if you look hard enough on github.

That's also why it's feasible to re-create userspace from scratch.

Anyway, it's gonna be nice having a lot of space to do interesting stuff in the modem's SoC.

That count is only of quectel and qualcomm binaries and libraries, busybox, sysvinit, scripts, config files etc. where not in that pack.

True though, most of them don't do anything interesting, or only one interesting thing for the thousand that could do in a typical scenario