Our first response, and the GPU field is wrong: gpu=Parsec%20Virtual%20Display%20Adapter&gpus=2 Parsec installs an indirect display driver, it enumerated first out of `Win32_VideoController`, and the primary was taken as the first entry -- so the real card on that machine is gone. `gpus=2` is the only reason we can tell anything was lost, and it cannot tell us what. This is not an edge case for this audience. Parsec, Sunshine, Moonlight, TeamViewer and Splashtop all install one, and a cloud-gaming community is precisely the population that has one already. A recorded gpu_model is a hard requirement for a host; a virtual display driver satisfies it in name only. Three changes. Adapters are now sorted so real hardware is first, by two keys: whether the name matches a known software adapter, then whether a vendor could be identified at all. Order is the only signal the rest of the program has for which GPU is "the" GPU. The vendor comes from `AdapterCompatibility` rather than from pattern-matching the marketing name. An "AMD Radeon" string is easy; an OEM-rebadged one is not. And every adapter name is now sent, not only the count. `gpus=2` told us something had been lost and not what, which is the kind of field that wastes a response we cannot ask again. The known-software-adapter list has unit tests, on all platforms -- it is a list of strings and it will need extending, so it should fail loudly rather than quietly stop matching. Version to 0.1.2. For the record, what that submission got right, because none of it needed asking: 50% of 165 Steam launch records fall in five hours of twenty-four (21:00-01:59) against five records across the whole of 07:00-13:59. That is 0017's evening peak, measured, from one person's own files. 140 of the 165 records are titles no longer installed -- restricting the histogram to installed titles, as review suggested, would have left 25 samples and lost the shape entirely.
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.