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Three places where build/ said something the tree does not do. - fstab mounted `/` as `rw`. A box is started with `ro` on the kernel command line and `is_read_only: true` on the root device (every config in nesbox's tree agrees: examples/vm.json, test.json, run.local.json), so the virtio-blk device rejects writes whatever fstab asks for. `rw` here only made OpenRC's `root` service attempt a remount that has to fail. The Dockerfile already depended on the truth — it pre-creates /nestri/* at build time precisely because a runtime mkdir gets EROFS — so this makes fstab agree with the comment that was already right. - build/README.md said nesbox's jail image "extracts Mesa and virglrenderer" from this base. It extracts only Mesa. virglrenderer is the host half of the native-context protocol and nesbox builds its own, patched, from nesbox/patches/; nothing in this image carries it at all. - conf.d/nestri-user-env called the zink driver-forcing block "load-bearing" directly above three exports that are commented out, here and in the profile.d copy. Whether they should come back is a separate question; a comment insisting disabled lines are load-bearing tells the next reader the opposite of what the file does. The reasoning is kept, because it is still the reason to re-enable them, along with why both copies have to move together. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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.