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.

Try it now — nesdoctor

One thing here is finished and runs on its own machine, today:

# Linux and macOS
curl -fsSL https://doctor.nestri.io/install.sh | sh

# Windows
powershell -c "irm https://doctor.nestri.io/install.ps1 | iex"

It tells you whether your machine could host games for other people, and measures the number that actually decides whether streaming a game feels right — not your download speed, but how much latency your connection adds when it is busy. A 500 Mbps uplink that queues for 300 ms under load cannot carry a game; a 25 Mbps one with fq_codel can. Almost nobody has seen their own figure.

  upstream             35 Mbps
  latency, idle floor  56 ms
  latency, loaded     185 ms
  added under load   +129 ms   grade F

  presentation path   x11 · bspwm
  eDP-1               1920x1200 @ 60 Hz, 8-bit
  Vulkan decode       h264, h265

It also reads your display out of its EDID — resolution, refresh, colour depth, HDR transfer functions, BT.2020, chroma — and what your hardware can decode. Those decide what is worth sending over the wire, and we would otherwise be guessing from one panel in one room.

It does not stream a game. It is the piece that has to exist before anything else can, and most machines will come back CLIENT — which is a real answer, not a failure.

Downloads one binary, verifies its checksum, runs it, deletes it. Installs nothing, needs no administrator rights, touches no system directory. Nothing is uploaded: it prints a link, lists exactly what the link contains, and opens it only if you press Enter. The scripts those URLs serve are apps/nesdoctor/install/ in this repository, so you can read them before you run them.

Source and the full story: apps/nesdoctor.

What is here

Two halves that meet over the network and share very little else, plus one thing that runs on your own machine.

The control plane — TypeScript

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. Both run on Cloudflare Workers today and as ordinary containers wherever you like — one handler each, no infrastructure-as-code, and a Dockerfile in each app. See docs/deploy.md and docs/dns.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.

On your own machine — Rust

apps/nesdoctor	Whether a machine can host a box, and what its connection and display can really do. The first executable form of our host requirements — until it existed, a host was qualified by a human reading a table. Four dependencies; everything that could be done with the standard library is.

The hypervisor the guest components 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
cp .env.example .env         # compose reads every credential from here
docker compose up postgres   # the database
bun run db:migrate           # schema
bun dev                      # control plane, local Cloudflare runtime
docker compose up --build    # or: the whole control plane as containers

cargo build --workspace      # guest components
cargo test --workspace

The guest components expect a Linux host with a Wayland-capable GPU stack, and 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.

nesdoctor is the exception and needs none of that:

cargo run --release -p nesdoctor

Status

Working: nesdoctor — released, and the only part a stranger can operate today. 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 two most useful things you can do right now cost a minute each: run nesdoctor and send the result, because we have almost no idea what the machines on the other end of this look like; and tell us where the documentation failed you. Conventional commits; explain why in the body.

Licence

Apache 2.0.