A small project is judged partly on how often it says something. Here are the news in date order and the road ahead, with the state of each item — including the ones that are not ready.
Left idle for a quarter of an hour, the board froze and came back only after cutting the power. The desktop was putting it to sleep, and the BC-250 does not wake up from sleep. With 26.09.48 sleep is switched off on the BC-250; other computers keep it. Update from the Hub.
If after the latest updates your Steam games close straight away and the Wayland session does not start, update to 26.09.46 from the Hub and reboot. If the Hub does not open, sudo apt install libllvm21 in a terminal is enough. The same version switches the 40 compute units on at every boot on systems installed from an ISO too, and Apply on the Tuner's CPU page works everywhere.
The SkillFishOS video driver decodes H.264 and H.265 through VA-API, so a player or a streaming tool looking for hardware acceleration finds some on a board where no other VA-API driver starts at all. Measured on the board at 1920x1080: 119 frames per second with H.264 and 96 with H.265, and every picture comes out sample for sample as the reference decoder makes it. It arrives with today's update, in the skillfish-vaapi-encoder package.
Debian is rebuilding Qt and KDE, and these days Discover can offer an update that removes the whole KDE Plasma desktop along with about 170 packages. If you see that list, press Cancel. The skillfish-desktop-guard package, which arrives with today's update, now makes that operation fail; the Hub never offered it. Discover leaves the next installation image. If it already happened, the troubleshooting page explains how to get the desktop back, even without snapshots.
The BC-250 has no video engine: until now, recording a game or streaming it fell to the processor, and you could tell. There is now a driver that compresses in H.264 and in HEVC using the board's 40 compute units. With a game actually running, recording costs it 13 per cent, and the recording holds 60 frames a second without dropping any. It arrives with the update and switches itself on, but only on a BC-250.
SkillFishOS held the processor to 85 degrees while the BC-250's own firmware asks for 95: it was our setting writing over the board's, at every boot. The limit is now 95 in the Tuner, on the Remote Manager page and in every preset. A machine already installed moves over by itself at the first update, unless that number had been changed by hand. Under load the processor keeps its clock for up to ten degrees longer before the thermal guard steps in.
Every memory chip on the BC-250 has a temperature sensor inside it, but it does not show up among the system's sensors: it answers only to the SMU. All eight can be read now, from the Monitor, from the Control Center and from a browser, on a drawing of the real board with the hottest one called out. The reading starts when you ask for it and stops when you say so. At rest the memory sits around 44 degrees, under a game around 49 with peaks of 60.
The Monitor wrote «GPU» next to a number that was the whole board's draw: thirty watts at idle, while the graphics were pulling four. There are three separate numbers now, in the Monitor, in the Control Center and from a browser: the whole board, the CPU and the GPU. The in-game HUD keeps the one that matters there, what the whole board draws, and now it says APU. While we were at it the charts stopped exaggerating: a fan running steadily no longer fills its box like a rollercoaster over thirty RPM.
Updates that never went away. Flatpak keeps two separate stores: the system one and one for each user, and the programs installed for your own user — the emulators, for instance — live in the second. «Update all» ran with system privileges and only ever touched the first, so those entries came back at every check no matter how many times they were updated. Both are updated now, components no program uses any more are removed afterwards, and the list shows the version beside the name, because two rows that looked identical were two different versions of the same thing.
Until yesterday the Mesa we build was used by the games only, and everything else on the BC-250, desktop included, ran on the distribution's one. From this update, on a BC-250 running our kernel, it is the driver of the machine from the moment it boots, and Steam and Heroic are pointed at it by themselves, with nothing to switch on. The frame rate in games is the same, measured: 92.3 against 92.6 in Cyberpunk 2077. On a PC that is not a BC-250 nothing changes, because the system recognises the machine from its firmware and leaves the stock driver where it is: and that decision is taken again at every boot, not once at installation.
Anyone who installed SkillFishOS on a PC that is not a BC-250 was booting with settings meant for the board. The awkward one capped the memory the graphics part may use at a fixed 6 GB, where the right figure is half of the RAM: too much on an 8 GB PC, too little on a 32 GB one. It came from the installation image, which carries a copy of a board's configuration, so every such PC had it. The system now notices by itself and removes them, keeping a copy of the file first; on a real BC-250 nothing changes.
The SkillFishOS kernel moves up to 7.2.6, the current stable release. It brings 1816 fixes from upstream over 7.2.5, seventeen of them in the AMD graphics driver, and none of the forty-three patches we carry for the BC-250 has changed. There is nothing new to try: this is maintenance, and it is what keeps a board left alone receiving the same security fixes as everybody else. Update with apt; the package picks by itself between the BC-250 build and the one for any other x86-64 PC.
The Compute Unit panel kept the first three pairs greyed out, because a comment of ours said the driver holds them on. It does not, and we measured it on the board: they switch off, and the performance drops in exact proportion. Now every pair can be switched off, with at least one left on per row, and the choice can be kept at boot: that is what you need when a Compute Unit is faulty and has to stay off. In the same round the CPU panel stopped offering clocks the board refuses and now says which value is wrong, and the Governor box answers for the next boot as well, not just for right now. Reported by tom lima, who also found a bug of ours in the mask code.
If you had turned on the 8-core unlock on the BC-250, the board took one extra reboot on every cold start. Now the unlock happens before the boot loader, so the board comes up in a single boot. It arrives with the update, there is nothing to do. If you never turned the unlock on, nothing changes for you.
When it opens, the Hub fills its list of programs in the background. Clicking a menu entry during those first seconds made the window disappear. Now the menu waits, and the entries stay off until it is ready, so you can see why. Reported by a user: thank you.
Several boards join up to hold a model that does not fit on one. A 22 GB 27B will not even start on a single BC-250; on two it runs at 7.57 tokens per second. That is what it is for, and it is worth saying plainly: it does not speed up models that already ran, because every step between boards travels over the network. The node is switched on when you need it, on your own local network.
Two editions, BC-250 and Generic, on kernel 7.2.5. The disk can be encrypted at install with LUKS, and the system boots with Secure Boot enabled. At the first login you choose what to install, the browser included. The system version rises with your updates, and AI mode frees the board's memory to run a model locally.
Until now the version was written only by the install image: whoever installed from 26.06.4 stayed 26.06.4 for ever, however many updates they downloaded. The number now travels inside the packages, so it rises by itself.
A window asks what you want on your system: Steam, Heroic, Lutris, the emulators, OnlyOffice and whichever browser you prefer among Firefox, Chrome, Chromium and Brave. Nothing is preinstalled and nothing is decided for you. Each program downloads with its own progress bar, and you can shut down halfway without losing anything: it picks up by itself at the next boot.
AI mode has three levels, chosen from the Control Center or the Remote Manager: shut down the desktop alone, or Unsloth Studio as well and leave llama-server by itself on port 8888, with the same API and the same key. With a model loaded the system goes from 567 to 115 MB. With the desktop down the screen is no longer black: a console shows the board's addresses and the way back, and the Remote Manager has an AI-Mode On/Off button.
The AI section of the Control Center drives Unsloth Studio instead of only switching it on: update in one click, first sign-in and API key from here, the models on disk, GGUF downloads from the Hugging Face Hub, a chat test with the measured tokens per second, and the engine opened to the local network. The same from a browser in the Remote Manager. In the Tuner the VRAM gains 512 MB and 1 GB presets.
We tried on our own board what the BC-250 community has published over the past months. Going into the distribution: the Control Center driven with a controller, Monitor recordings exported to CSV, the ACPI table with the missing methods, the unified memory heap for RADV with a 10 GB shader cache, unlocking the 8 cores before GRUB, and two kernel patches, for the DualSense behind a bridge and for YCbCr 4:4:4 on DisplayPort-HDMI dongles. The full log is in docs/COMMUNITY.md.
The seven SkillFishOS windows become one, with twelve sections, and it now covers things that used to need a terminal: our Mesa for Steam or system-wide, the scheduler that starts with games, GE-Proton 11, the profiles. The Tuner is rewritten around the governor curve: fifteen points you drag and an Apply that puts the curve on trial with a countdown, so a bad curve does not leave you stranded. The same sections are in the Remote Manager.
On the BC-250 a guard watches the temperature and takes 100 MHz off the processor when the board runs hot. It now gives them back: as soon as the board cools down the frequency climbs again, and stops where it started. On our bench that is worth 1.2% of the frames on a machine that has played with the fan at its limit. If you lowered the frequency yourself it stays where you put it: the guard only undoes its own work. It arrives with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade.
SkillFishOS boots with Secure Boot on, the way almost every PC leaves the factory. We build the kernel and we sign it: skillfish-secureboot gets our key enrolled in your computer's firmware, once, with a confirmation at the next restart. The first boot from the USB stick still wants Secure Boot off, because the key cannot be enrolled before that.
The kernel package looks at the machine before downloading: on a BC-250 it takes the board's kernel, on an ordinary PC an -x64 build, made for a generic processor and carrying the firmware and drivers a laptop needs. In the same pass, the services that only make sense on the board now check for themselves what they are running on, so on an ordinary PC they do not start at all instead of trying at every boot.
Kernel 7.2.0 now arrives with an ordinary update. Until now it only sat among the files you download by hand on GitHub. It is not faster than 7.1.7, the differences we measured are inside the noise. The point is keeping up with the upstream kernel and its drivers. The graphics driver meanwhile is at Mesa 26.1.6, the same version the most up-to-date gaming distributions carry. It comes from Debian; we do not build it.
In the Tuner the CPU undervolt reads in millivolts: -150 mV instead of «-24», which was the firmware's number, and the summary line shows both voltages the same way. The conversion is measured on the board: one step is 6.25 mV. The update check goes from once a day to every hour, and the notification only speaks when the numbers change.
The earlier 26.06.x images have been replaced: if you have one, download 26.06.4. On the BC-250 the install reaches the end and a system installed on Btrfs boots. Unlocking the eight cores starts out switched off and is asked for from the Tuner once the machine is installed.
⚠️ This image has been replaced: use 26.06.4.
Two editions, BC-250 and Generic, for the AMD board and for any x86-64 PC or virtual machine. The language you pick now applies everywhere: interface, login screen, web panel and the installer's slides. Underneath: kernel 7.1.7 with 40 Compute Units and eight cores, Btrfs with restore points from the first boot, local AI on the GPU.
The system takes a restore point before and one after every apt operation, keeps five of them and lists them in the boot menu. To actually go back there is sudo skillfish-rollback 12: at the next restart the system is the one from then, and --annulla puts things back. Your home directory is never touched.
Instead of three Docker containers there is now a single native service, offering both the chat and an OpenAI-compatible API. Docker is no longer installed.
On the board, with Qwen3-1.7B: 210 tokens per second on the GPU over Vulkan against 41 on the CPU alone — five times as fast. Models come straight from the Hugging Face catalogue. The service listens on loopback only: from outside you reach it through the remote panel, which authenticates against the system accounts.
Images rebuilt with the fixes gathered over the first month: live session language, AI on the GPU, user groups. Three editions on SourceForge.
A second-hand mining board becomes a ready-to-use console-PC: a custom kernel with the 40 Compute Unit unlock, an SMU governor, overclock profiles with a thermal guard, a steampunk theme from boot to desktop, Steam and emulators, on-device AI.
It started as a way to get my children using and learning Linux while they game. Gaming is the carrot, snapshots are the net.
Want to know what comes next? There is the roadmap.
Got an idea, or is something missing? Requests are welcome: write from the contact page or open a discussion on GitHub. Building what someone actually needs beats guessing well.
