BIOS/Firmware emulation - what's going on?

Also, Nouveau seems to be a step forward with regards to the "mystery" of NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA also reported that they would release more info on their GPUs specificially for Nouveau.

EXTRA: I know that, as of now, emulating the firmware isn't the priority, but I mean in the future it certainly could be added along to benefit the full PS3 emulation experience.

I haven't contributed much and haven't touched the emulator core in a meaningful way but I'm going to give my 2 cents.

As for the GPU documentation, the RSX documentation is very specific on the performance properties and internal architecture (128 bit alignments, exact placement in memory of bitmaps, buffer zones for npot textures, acess to internally swizzled texture formats, etc). The problem we're having is that there's no equivalently low-level interface on the PC side (and before you ask, no, mantle probably won't help us much here). So we have to use the much more higher level OpenGL to emulate the low level GPU commands that the PS3 gcm interface exposes.

Running the firmware on top of the emulator just doesn't seem beneficial enough to me to warrant it. It certainly would save work on implementing all the system calls but emulating the driver interfaces that the PS3 OS seems like it's unecessarily low-level to me. There's a reason why even Sony didn't go that route when they created their PS2/1 and PSP emulators on the ps3 to run their PSClassics (those guys know what they do)

But as Alex said, it's an open source project, you can contribute to it freely and if you don't like the direction it's heading you can always fork it and steer it your way.