Hi,

Installing bladerf (pacman -S bladrf) gives us the following FPGA firmware²:

/usr/share/bladerf/fpga/hostedx115.rbf
/usr/share/bladerf/fpga/hostedx40.rbf

According to their website¹ they use an "Altera Cyclone IV FPGA",
and as far as I know, there is no free software tools to compile³ the source code⁴ into the firmware².

I also wonder about the license and tools needed to build this firmware:

/usr/share/bladerf/firmware/bladeRF_fw_v2.0.0.img

# strings /usr/share/bladerf/firmware/bladeRF_fw_v2.0.0.img | grep -i threadx
Copyright (c) 1996-2008 Express Logic Inc. * ThreadX ARM9/RVDS Version G5.1.5.1 SN: 2923-115-1301 *

Also ThreadX⁵ seem to be a proprietary embedded operating system.

This firmware might be for the following chip:

The Cypress FX3 microcontroller is the ideal solution with a powerful ARM9 processor and enough bandwidth to saturate the full duplex 5Gbps USB 3.0 link.

Note that we have some ARM compilers in parabola, so we could build this firmware if it's free software:

community/arm-none-eabi-binutils
community/arm-none-eabi-gcc
community/arm-none-eabi-gdb
community/arm-none-eabi-newlib

Also note that I have no bladerf, and no access to such hardware.
I only know that very few FPGA are usable with free software, and at the time of writing,
only various FPGAs from the ICE40 series are.

References:
------------
[1] https://www.nuand.com/
[2] This is called "bitstream" in the FPGA jargon
[3] This is called "synthetize" in the FPGA jargon
[4] I've no idea how this is called, but the kind of language they use is
called "Hardware description language(HDL)"
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX