Is nouveau completely free of non-free code? Is nouveau) completely free of non-free code, including dependency on non-free firmware? This article makes it seem like nouveau depends on closed source firmware, but if I understand correctly, only requires it during development after which it creates its own firmware. Here's a bit more context: I recently found out that radeon can or sometimes must use non-free firmware blobs and I was wondering if the same was true for nouveau.

The nouveau driver itself is entirely free software. On recent GPUs though it needs to load proprietary firmware into the GPU; see the list of NVIDIA blobs in the `firmware-misc-nonfree` package’s description in Debian. The “state of Nouveau” presentation from last year’s XDC covers some of the issues.

You can determine whether your own system uses firmware blobs by looking for firmware loading messages in the kernel logs (`dmesg`).

Unfortunately on _x86_ all recent GPUs require proprietary blobs, whether from AMD, NVIDIA or Intel.