Project Ariel

Liberating the ASRock BC-250.

Project Ariel is Cachenetics' open-source effort to reverse engineer and liberate the ASRock BC-250 - a Zen 2 + RDNA accelerator on a harvested AMD console-class APU (codename Ariel, PCI 1002:13FE), built by the tens of thousands for a crypto workload that evaporated and now sold as e-waste: 16 GB of unified memory and a real GPU, locked down and underclocked as shipped.

We tear down the firmware and the silicon - mapping SMU mailboxes, freeing the full GPU, retraining memory, and lifting the factory clock and power limits - to unlock hardware the vendor left crippled. The result is a board that punches well above its throwaway price: console-class compute for the cost of e-waste. All open, all reproducible, all documented.

Tools

• arieltune - the unified BC-250 tuning suite. One tabbed TUI + CLI (WIKI / BIOS / APU / MEM): browse the firmware surface, tune GDDR6 memory timings, unlock and tune the APU (40-CU liberation, CPU/GPU/CU control), and read the hardware-verified BC-250 manual. Built on reverse-engineered SMU mailboxes and a liberated amdgpu.

Get it running

Runs on a BC-250 (or an Ariel-APU board) under Linux x86-64. You need a Rust toolchain to build (rustup.rs) and root for any actuation.

git clone https://github.com/cachenetics/project-ariel.git
cd project-ariel
./install.sh                 # build (release) + install to /usr/local/bin
arieltune                    # launch the TUI (opens on WIKI)

install.sh installs one binary (arieltune), a short at alias, and aputune/memtune/biostune/wikitune compat symlinks. Jump straight to a tab with arieltune apu (or bios / mem / wiki); everything is also scriptable from the CLI. See arieltune/README.md for the full build/usage guide.

Safety

These tools write hardware - SMU registers, CMOS/NVRAM, SPI flash, memory training. A bad value can fail to POST and need a power-cycle or CMOS-clear. Read each tool's SECURITY.md and its inline safety notes first; firmware and memory tuning are done at your own risk, on hardware you own.

Licensing

GPL-2.0-only for the entire project. The kernel-derived parts (the amdgpu liberation patch series and kernel modules, under arieltune/) were always GPL-2.0, inheriting the Linux kernel's license; the rest of the tree now matches. See LICENSE and the per-subtree NOTICE files under arieltune/crates/ for upstream provenance and attribution.