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The first executable form of our host requirements. Until now a machine was
qualified by a human reading a table of hard requirements, and a requirement
nothing can check is one that is silently optional.
It also replaces a form. Every field we wanted from a prospective host --
upstream, latency under load, spare disk, hours powered, library size, play
hours -- is measurable, and most of them cannot be answered honestly by a
human anyway: almost nobody knows their real upstream and essentially nobody
has seen their own bufferbloat figure. What is left for the questions is only
what a machine cannot know: intent, and what someone already pays.
What it does
- Checks every hard requirement: /dev/kvm, an AMD or Intel GPU with a DRM
render node, VK_KHR_video_encode_queue plus a codec, virglrenderer, the
two stores, the io cgroup controller, virtiofsd. Pass/fail/unknown, and
unknown is never collapsed into fail -- a machine we could not ask is not
a machine that failed.
- Measures upstream and, the point of the whole thing, added latency under
load. Grade bands come from the frame budget rather than convention: the
network allowance is ~40 ms because render, encode, decode, display and
jitter buffer have already spent ~58 ms.
- Reads Steam, only with an explicit yes, for library size and shape and an
hour-of-day histogram of launches -- one sample per title, which is a real
distribution obtained without asking.
- Asks at most five questions, branched, all skippable.
No server
Nothing is uploaded and no telemetry endpoint exists. The network test talks
to Cloudflare's public sink and to 1.1.1.1, neither of which is ours. Output
is a line on the terminal that the person may choose to paste. The line
carries no hostname, IP, username, game title or path -- a size band rather
than a size, hours rather than dates. The long version stays in a local
JSON file.
Three bugs found by running it, all of which would have produced wrong data
- vulkaninfo --summary lists ZERO VK_KHR_video entries where full vulkaninfo
lists five on the same machine. Preferring the summary reported "not
advertised" on a card that advertises it -- a false negative on the check
most likely to disqualify a host.
- btrfs subvolumes were counted as separate disks: /, /home and /srv each
reported 91 GiB of one 91 GiB device. Deduped by backing device, which the
two-stores check needs anyway since it wants separate devices.
- Proton and the Steam Linux Runtimes are installed like games and are not
games. Five of eight entries on the test machine, so the title count was
5x too high and the library-shape question was corrupted.
And one finding about the development connection, now encoded as a verdict:
178 ms idle RTT, served from Johannesburg. That machine passes every other
check and cannot host for a European player, because it is distance and no
upgrade shortens it. HOST-READY-LOCAL exists for exactly that case -- and it
is the coverage argument from the other end: somewhere with no nearby edge is
somewhere a local host is the only option anyone has.
Dependencies are four, three of them serde/clap/anyhow. The VDF parser, every
platform probe and the text wrapping are in-tree: a binary handed to strangers
has a dependency tree that is part of its interface.
Run your games on a GPU you don't own — or one you do. Nestri puts an interactive workload in a hardware-accelerated virtual machine and streams it to you over QUIC, at a latency that lets you play rather than watch.
Note
This repository is mid-rewrite, and the documentation is behind the code. The guest-side components arrived recently and their docs are thin. Nothing here is stable yet: expect directories to move and interfaces to change. Proper documentation is on the way — issues and questions are welcome in the meantime, and are genuinely useful for deciding what to write first.
What is here
Two halves that meet over the network and share very little else.
The control plane — TypeScript, on Cloudflare Workers
apps/api |
The public REST API. Identity, teams, machines, games, pairing. |
apps/auth |
A self-hosted OpenAuth issuer — Steam and SSH-key login. |
packages/core |
The domain: every table, every operation, no HTTP. |
packages/auth |
Shared auth types and subjects. |
Postgres for state, Alchemy for infrastructure. See
docs/alchemy.md.
The guest — Rust, inside the box
These run inside a virtual machine, beside the game. None of them talk to the control plane.
apps/nescope |
A headless Wayland compositor for one fullscreen client. A lighter answer to the same problem gamescope solves. |
apps/nescapture |
A Vulkan implicit layer. It captures frames from inside the workload's own process and encodes them on the GPU that drew them — no copy out to the CPU and back. |
apps/neswire |
Audio capture and transport. |
apps/neshub |
One connection out of the box. Muxes video, audio, cursor and input into a single QUIC stream to the client. |
crates/nesprotocol |
The wire types they all share, so no two ends can drift apart silently. |
The hypervisor these run under is nesbox,
a separate repository: a micro-VM with a real GPU in it, using virtio-gpu native
context rather than passthrough, so one card can host several boxes at once.
Why a virtual machine
A container shares the host kernel, which makes strong isolation hard and a GPU harder. A micro-VM boots in about as long, isolates properly, and — with native context — gets close to bare-metal graphics. That choice is what makes "many sandboxes, one GPU" possible instead of one tenant per card.
Getting started
bun install
bun dev # control plane, local Cloudflare runtime
cargo build --workspace # guest components
cargo test --workspace
The Rust components expect a Linux host with a Wayland-capable GPU stack. They are not much use on their own yet — they are pieces of a box, and the thing that assembles a box is not open yet.
Status
Working: the API, auth, the domain model, and the guest components listed above.
Not here yet: the box lifecycle, storage, the edge, and the client. Some of that will open as it is written; some is deliberately closed. What decides which is whether it handles your data — that half is open on principle — or decides our capacity, which is the part we sell.
Contributing
Early, and the ground moves. The most useful contribution right now is telling us where the documentation failed you. Conventional commits; explain why in the body.