SkillFishOS takes the cheap, abundant AMD BC‑250 compute board — a semi‑custom APU from the AMD Zen 2 + RDNA 2 family (CPU codename Oberon, GPU Cyan Skillfish / GFX1013, 16 GB GDDR6) — and makes it a proper Linux machine: a steampunk KDE Plasma desktop on one side, a Steam Big‑Picture / EmuDeck games console on the other, with all of the board's awkward hardware tamed and tuned for you.

It began as a way to get kids to use and learn Linux while they game — gaming is the carrot, Btrfs snapshots are the safety net that lets them tinker without fear.

The whole point: a ready‑to‑use system, no tinkering required. Every governor, kernel patch, overclock profile, thermal guard and driver workaround is already configured and tested — you turn it on and it runs at full speed. Everything is documented here so the community can understand it, reproduce it, and make it better.

🤝 This is a community open‑source project and we want it to grow. Contributions of every kind are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Hardware target

The BC‑250 is fantastic value but a difficult target: non‑standard clock control through the SMU, a broken display IRQ/HPD path, an unreliable RDSEED, locked‑down compute units, no IOMMU and BIOS ACPI gaps. SkillFishOS papers over all of it. See docs/OPTIMIZATIONS.md for the full list and how each problem is solved.

Highlights

• 🐧 Custom linux-tkg kernel 7.0.10-skillfishos — BORE scheduler, GCC -O3, -march=znver2, 1000 Hz, NTsync + fsync, with BC‑250 patches: GPU clock range unlocked 350–2230 MHz, 40‑CU unlock (opt‑in), and the cosmetic "RDSEED is not reliable…" boot spam silenced. Prebuilt .deb in Releases — see docs/BUILD.md.
• ⚡ Real clock control — the cyan-skillfish-governor drives the GPU to its safe‑point and idles it at 350 MHz; an SMU CPU overclock & undervolt reaches 4.0 GHz (validated) under an 85 °C thermal guard. ~11,330 GFLOPS fp32 with the 40‑CU unlock (≈1.8× a stock build). The ISO ships the safe Stock profile; users opt into more from the Tuner.
• 🎛️ SkillFishOS Tuner — a native PyQt6 app to overclock & undervolt CPU and GPU, control the fan, resize the UMA VRAM split, and toggle the 40‑CU unlock, with four ready presets (Stock · Performance · Turbo · Crazy) and built‑in benchmark‑and‑rollback testing. Bilingual IT/EN. No terminal needed.
• 📊 Live system HUD — a translucent overlay with per‑core CPU load, clocks, temps, power draw, VRAM/RAM, fan RPM and Bluetooth controller battery, all from real sensors.
• 📸 Btrfs + Snapper + grub‑btrfs — automatic pre/post‑apt snapshots and bootable rollbacks straight from the GRUB menu, with @home kept separate so a rollback never touches user data.
• 🎮 Gaming, ready — Steam, Heroic, Proton, gamescope (+ FSR 1), GameMode, MangoHud, plus EmuDeck and the ES‑DE frontend to install and configure emulators in a few clicks. (SkillFishOS ships the tools, not the games — you bring your own games and ROMs.)
• 🧠 On‑device AI — an Ollama + OpenWebUI stack accelerated in Vulkan on the integrated GPU, with a one‑click panel that frees the GPU when you want to play.
• 🎨 End‑to‑end steampunk theme — GRUB, Plymouth, SDDM, the KDE Plasma desktop, icons, cursors, Kvantum and wallpaper. The theme lives in theme/.
• 🖨️ Driverless printing (CUPS + IPP Everywhere + Avahi), Bluetooth controllers, broken‑HPD display hot‑swap, and a fully localized desktop.

Screenshots

About this system	SkillFishOS Tuner

Local AI panel	EmuDeck — easy emulation

Performance

vkpeak fp32‑scalar throughput (GFLOPS):

CPU OC validated up to 4.0 GHz (~1224 mV, 120 s stress, 83 °C peak) on the reference board; under combined CPU+GPU load the APU shares its power budget gracefully, easing CPU clocks to stay within the 85 °C limit. Full methodology and benchmarks: docs/OPTIMIZATIONS.md.

Get it

Prebuilt kernel

A prebuilt kernel .deb is published under Releases:

sudo dpkg -i linux-image-7.0.10-skillfishos_7.0.10-1_amd64.deb \
            linux-headers-7.0.10-skillfishos_7.0.10-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-mark hold linux-image-7.0.10-skillfishos linux-headers-7.0.10-skillfishos

To build it yourself, see docs/BUILD.md and kernel-build/.

Installable ISO — 26.06 "Aetherium"

The installable live ISO (SkillFishOS-26.06-Aetherium-BC250-amd64.iso, ~5.6 GB) is captured from the real system with penguins‑eggs: KDE Plasma steampunk desktop, Btrfs + Snapper + grub‑btrfs, the Calamares installer. It boots in English and lets you pick your language and keyboard at install; the bilingual apps and HUD follow the chosen locale.

The publishing flow (ISO hosting on SourceForge, the aetherium APT update repository, and the DistroWatch submission) is scaffolded under distribution/.

Download link and the update repository go live with the SourceForge upload — track progress on skillfishos.com.

Repository layout

README.md          this file
LICENSE            GPL-3.0
CONTRIBUTING.md    how to get involved
docs/              full documentation
  OPTIMIZATIONS.md   kernel patches, governor, OC/UV, 40-CU, VRAM/GTT, audio/display, controllers
  DESKTOP.md         KDE Plasma, steampunk theme, HUD, Tuner, AI panel
  GAMING.md          Steam, EmuDeck, ES-DE, emulators (bring your own games)
  AI.md              the local Ollama + OpenWebUI Vulkan stack
  BUILD.md           building the kernel and the ISO
kernel-build/      linux-tkg recipe (customization.cfg + BC-250 userpatches)
theme/             the "SkillFish Steampunk" theme (icons, cursors, Kvantum, wallpapers, palettes)
distribution/      release & publishing: APT repo (suite aetherium), SourceForge, DistroWatch
iso/               live-build configuration for the installable ISO
scripts/           helper scripts (e.g. publish-kernel.sh)
screenshots/       images used in this README
legacy/            superseded early setup scripts, kept for reference

Documentation

Everything that makes the BC‑250 sing is documented:

• docs/OPTIMIZATIONS.md — the heart of the project: the kernel patches, SMU governor, CPU/GPU overclock & undervolt, 40‑CU unlock, VRAM/GTT tuning, broken‑HPD display fix, audio, Wi‑Fi/Bluetooth and controllers.
• docs/DESKTOP.md — KDE Plasma, the steampunk theme, the live HUD, the Tuner and the AI panel.
• docs/GAMING.md — the gaming stack and how EmuDeck / ES‑DE are set up.
• docs/AI.md — running LLMs locally on the integrated GPU via Vulkan.
• docs/BUILD.md — build the kernel and the ISO from source.

Contributing

We genuinely want this project to take off, and that needs people. Whether you can write kernel patches, package software, improve the theme, test on real hardware, fix typos in the docs, or just file good bug reports — you're welcome here. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md, open an issue, or say hi in a discussion.

Status

Work in progress, dogfooded daily on real BC‑250 hardware. An independent community project — not affiliated with AMD or any other vendor.

Credits & references

Built on the shoulders of:

• Frogging‑Family/linux‑tkg — the kernel build system
• Magnap/cyan‑skillfish‑governor — GPU SMU clock control
• bc250‑collective/bc250_smu_oc · fanoush/bc250_memcfg · duggasco/bc250‑40cu‑unlock
• EmuDeck · ES‑DE · Ollama
• BC‑250 community docs: bc250.info · elektricm.github.io/amd-bc250-docs · mothenjoyer69/bc250-documentation

License

GPL‑3.0. The bundled artwork/theme is provided for use with SkillFishOS.