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Reference

Troubleshooting

The most common BC-250 problems and how SkillFishOS handles them.

Many of the BC-250’s “problems” are actually known hardware flaws that SkillFishOS works around automatically. Here are the most common ones.

The screen stays black / the monitor isn’t detected

The DisplayPort Hot-Plug Detect (HPD) is broken: the board doesn’t detect when you connect a monitor. SkillFishOS handles this with the skillfish-dp-hotswap daemon (which forces detection at boot and on monitor changes) and the video=DP-1:e kernel parameter.

What to check:

  • use a DisplayPort monitor or a passive DP→HDMI adapter;
  • avoid active DP→HDMI adapters: besides detection issues, they break the audio (see below);
  • if the monitor changed, wait a few seconds: detection is automatic but not instant.

The board won’t wake from standby

Suspend is broken at the hardware level. SkillFishOS disables it completely for this very reason (see Desktop). If the board appears “dead” after being idle and power management had been changed, the only way out is a physical reset. Do not re-enable sleep states.

No audio from the monitor/TV

DisplayPort audio works, but:

  • active DP→HDMI adapters break the audio: use passive adapters, a native DP monitor, a USB DAC or Bluetooth audio;
  • the audio stack is PipeWire: the default sink is set from KDE’s audio settings.

The controllers don’t work

  • DualShock 4 controllers go over Bluetooth (with gyroscope). To pair: hold Share + PS until they blink, then pair from the Bluetooth GUI.
  • A controller over USB must be connected with a data cable (not just charging): it’s recognized as an Xbox 360.
  • Clone controllers may not share the Bluetooth adapter well with the DS4s: in that case use them over USB.

The GPU seems slow / temperatures are high

  • Check in the Tuner that the 40 CUs and the V/F governor (skillfish-vf-governor) are active.
  • Remember the cooling is marginal: after prolonged load the thermal-guard (85 °C) kicks in. For valid benchmarks, let the board cool between runs (see GPU).
  • For CPU-bound games, lowering the resolution won’t raise the FPS.

The board froze (hard freeze)

The BC-250 can hit a hard freeze (total lock-up), often tied to too-aggressive undervolt: the instability mostly shows up at low load, so a freeze can even strike at idle. SkillFishOS tackles it on two fronts:

  • Hardware watchdog — the chipset’s SP5100 TCO timer is active (RuntimeWatchdogSec=2min): if the system locks up completely, the board reboots itself within two minutes, no need to pull the power.
  • Freeze detector — at boot a service notices whether the previous shutdown was abnormal (no clean-shutdown marker) and logs it to /var/log/skillfish-freeze.log, with a desktop notification. This also shows up on the Status page of Control Center.

If freezes recur, lower the curve’s ceiling (e.g. from Performance to Balanced or Cautious) in the Tuner: the less aggressive value is almost always the fix. Every curve is applied with an automatic test and rollback — a freeze mid-trial never leaves the board on an unstable curve at reboot. If they persist even at Cautious, suspect the power supply.

An update broke something

Every package operation takes a snapshot before and after. The snapshots in the GRUB → “SkillFishOS snapshots” menu start read-only: good for looking around and copying files out, not for carrying on. To really go back, from a terminal or a text console (Ctrl+Alt+F3):

sudo skillfish-rollback --elenco
sudo skillfish-rollback <number>
sudo reboot

<number> is the “pre” snapshot from right before the bad update; sudo skillfish-rollback --annulla undoes the rollback. Your home folder is not touched. See Storage and snapshots.

An update removed the desktop

In September 2026 Debian was rebuilding Qt and KDE, and Discover offered an update that removed the whole KDE desktop. Since then SkillFishOS prevents it, and the Hub has replaced Discover. Always update from the SkillFishOS Hub.

If it happened to you, the snapshot from before that update is the cleanest way back (see above). Without snapshots, from a text console (Ctrl+Alt+F3):

curl -fsSLo repair.sh https://skillfishos.com/repair.sh
sudo bash repair.sh

The script finds what that update removed, shows the plan and asks before changing anything. It removes nothing and does not touch your home folder. Reboot when it says Done.

The AI won’t start or gives strange output

  • The AI runs on Vulkan (not ROCm) and shouldn’t be used together with games (same GPU/RAM).
  • If the output is corrupted, make sure you’re using the KV cache in f16 (q4_0 corrupts the output on RADV). See On-device AI.

Sources