RYF allows various "tricks" of hiding blobs, so it is not what I'd use as the benchmark here. Raptor's standards are likely higher than what RYF would require...
I don't know if the firmware on embedded controllers in currently ryf-certified laptops are open source, but that is the only source of "trick" I can see that could be currently explored to get ryf certification.
I've heard people saying things like "even a windows device could be ryf-certified if it was in ROM", but I see nothing even close to this when I look at currently ryf-certified devices. People are probably influenced by this: https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-solving-the-first-fsf-ryf-hurd... where a Purism engineer describes a "trick" to store a memory controller training firmware in ROM and run it on a "secondary processsor" so it can get Librem 5 ryf-certified; but to this day Librem 5 is still not certified and probably won't because of this specific issue.
Also there are the people who correctly question that ryf is silly because it accepts software without code available if it is in ROM and only runs on a secondary processor. I currently have no counter-argument to this and I think it would be great if FSF explained it clearly. Nevertheless, there are some reasonable points to consider that stance:
- AFAIK, the form of accepted code is only for "secondary processors" and can't take over the system or compromise it,
- having things in ROM forces manufacturers to maximally simplify it,
- having things in ROM forces manufacturers to implement more features in software that can be checked and
- having things in ROM forces manufacturers to be extra careful when implementing it.
I'm not saying that RYF is entirely useless, just that "new version requires firmware blobs, old one didn't" is a clearer and stronger statement than mentioning RYF IMHO.
I mentioned ryf certification because Tallos II and Talos II Lite are the only ryf-certified modern systems available. Also, I bet FSF is very strict when certifying systems so we don't have to rely on the word of the vendor only.
POWER10 could probably game RYF certification. Raptor is really much stricter than everyone on that topic. If you make bits of firmware non-upgradeable, I believe you can pass them as RYF-certified even if they are blobs - they are counted as part of the hardware.
Raptor didn't accept anything like that, closest is the minimal (it's a RISC after all) microcode mask rom in POWER9 core that AFAIK is effectively covering some hairy and rarely used instructions as multiple standard Power instructions. And it's so small thing that I am not really sure it's there...
