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Two things, both of which every response collected without them is a response we cannot go back for -- since a submission carries nothing that identifies anyone, there is no second chance to ask. ## The display and decode probe This is the readable half of the client capability probe our build order already specifies -- GPU, decoder, display -- and its stated purpose is attribution: told only that a stream "looks bad", the cheapest available explanation is that our reconstruction ratio was too aggressive, so without this we would lower the ratio and pay density for somebody else's window manager. presentation path x11 · bspwm eDP-1 1920x1200 @ 60 Hz, 8-bit Vulkan decode h264, h265 VA-API decode h264, h265, vp9 Session type, compositor, and whether we are under XWayland -- which is exactly the objection raised against our own A/B rounds, now recorded automatically rather than argued about. A bare window manager sets none of the XDG variables, so bspwm and thirteen others are matched from the process list; a report that cannot name bspwm cannot answer the challenge that named it. From EDID, parsed here rather than shelled out to: native mode, refresh, colour bit depth, which HDR transfer functions the panel accepts, BT.2020 colorimetry, and 4:2:0 chroma. The CTA-861 extension blocks are where all the colour capability lives -- base EDID says nothing about any of it. That decides real choices. Whether 10-bit is worth sending, whether BT.2020 is worth encoding, which codec to reach for. Every one of those has so far been decided against the one panel in this room -- which this now reports as 8-bit, meaning the 10-bit work cannot be validated on it at all. EDID is untrusted binary from a device node. Every read is bounds-checked and every field optional: monitors ship broken EDIDs and docks synthesise worse ones, so a bad panel costs one field rather than the run. Three tests, one of which truncates the block mid-extension and asserts that no colour capability is invented. The colorimetry byte offset was wrong the first time and the test caught it, which is the argument for the test. Present mode, tearing and fractional scaling need a real window and swapchain, so they are absent and said to be absent rather than guessed. ## Early access An optional email, asked last, after the verdict has printed -- so nobody types an address before seeing what this said about their machine. Blank skips it. The offer branches on the verdict, because telling someone with no KVM and a grade-F uplink that we liked what their machine can do is a lie, and this program's only real asset is that it does not flatter anyone. A host-capable machine gets the host offer; everyone else gets early access as a player, which is a true offer too. It is the one identifying thing collected here, so: it appears in the pre-submit disclosure with everything else, and the promise elsewhere had to be reworded -- "no username, no identifiers" stopped being true the moment this field existed, and leaving the old line standing would have been the dishonest option. Validation is deliberately loose; arguing with somebody about their own address over a regex loses the response outright. Version to 0.2.0.
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.