A fork of LizardByte / Sunshine

A game-streaming host you control.

SolarFlare runs on your Linux PC and streams games or the desktop to Moonlight clients. Its Web UI handles pairing, applications, settings, and troubleshooting.

Install SolarFlare View source

Self-hosted streaming on your LAN. No cloud in the path.

Client protocol: Moonlight / GameStream
Control plane: https://localhost:47990
Host focus: Linux x86-64, AMD and Intel
Release: View latest release

https://localhost:47990 - Host status

SolarFlare Web UI home screen with sidebar navigation and host status controls.

What it does

Your own game-streaming host: no subscription, no cloud

SolarFlare turns a Linux machine into a private streaming host. Install it on the PC that has your GPU, pair a Moonlight client (phone, tablet, laptop, TV, or handheld), and play your full library remotely over your own network. The video never leaves your LAN and no third-party server sits in the path.

It is a fork of LizardByte's Sunshine, focused on Linux with tuning for modern AMD and Intel CPUs. SolarFlare adds controls for network pacing, capture scheduling, NVENC profiles, and audio processing. The Web UI keeps those settings beside pairing, applications, and logs.

In-home game streamingRemote desktopHeadless game serverCouch / TV playHandheld & phone

cloud services in the stream path

fork-specific tunables (10 host + 24 audio)

Linux distro families auto-detected

Primary use: High-quality game & desktop streaming across a trusted local network
Host focus: Linux x86-64, with tuning for modern AMD and Intel CPUs
Client protocol: Moonlight / NVIDIA GameStream-compatible transport
Control plane: Responsive HTTPS interface at localhost:47990
Upstream: A fork of LizardByte / Sunshine
License: GPL-3.0-only

Fork additions

Each subsystem has its own controls

Defaults stay compatible with upstream. Disable any tuning path when you want a cleaner comparison on a given host.

Host control

A responsive Web UI with command search, host status, and troubleshooting tools.

Network path

Link-aware pacing, optional busy polling, expanded 4 MiB ENet buffers, DSCP QoS tagging, and adaptive bitrate controls.

Scheduling

Capture-thread affinity, controlled real-time scheduling, native CPU microarch tuning, and optional boot-time performance services.

Video

NVENC tuning profiles, per-application encoder overrides, headless display paths, and hardware-aware capture selection.

Audio

Low-latency PipeWire hints plus optional AGC, voice activity detection, ducking, noise gating, and full Opus encoder control.

Operations

Scoped API tokens, trusted-subnet pairing, a local Moonlight client catalog, and structured tagged logs.

Performance architecture

From display capture to the client

Fork work sits in four places. Capture follows frame arrival, per-session pacing bounds batches and drops stale frames, and the encoder can apply live NVENC bitrate changes when the hardware supports it.

Capture

X11, KMS, PipeWire/portal, headless compositor, and optional Hermes-KMS paths are selected for the build and host environment.

Encode

NVENC presets and per-application overrides tune latency, lookahead, adaptive quantization, and frame structure. The protocol stays the same.

Transport

Link-speed detection, pacing, socket buffers, busy polling, QoS marking, and adaptive bitrate respond to local-network conditions.

Control

The HTTPS UI, API scopes, pairing rules, and diagnostics expose host state. No cloud services sit in the streaming path.

latency_mode

safe

Bounded, quality-preserving defaults.

aggressive

Tighter audio and scaler tradeoffs; two-pass NVENC is off.

Web interface

Manage the host from one page

The Web UI runs on the host at https://localhost:47990. It supports keyboard navigation and adapts to desktop and mobile screens. Switch tabs to see each page.

https://localhost:47990 - Home

SolarFlare home screen showing host status and platform, with Pair a device and Open applications actions.

Monitor the host. The home page shows host status, version, and platform, with direct links for pairing a device or managing applications.

Configuration

Change host settings without rebuilding

Ten SolarFlare settings live in the same ~/.config/sunshine/sunshine.conf file. Set a key back to its upstream value to undo that subsystem. There are also 24 audio and Opus controls in the Web UI.

The tunables at a glance

busy_poll_us50
SO_BUSY_POLL on the ENet UDP socket, in microseconds.
rate_cap_pct80
Percent of negotiated link speed used as the pacer.
enet_4mib_buffertrue
Grow ENet UDP send/recv buffers to 4 MiB.
pipewire_latency_ms8
PW_KEY_NODE_LATENCY hint to the PipeWire compositor.
cpu_pinningtrue
Pin the capture thread to a non-IRQ, non-SMT core.
dscp_qostrue
Tag ENet packets with DSCP CS3 for router QoS.
gpu_governortrue
Force the GPU performance profile during a stream.
headless_virtual_displayfalse
Create a virtual xrandr output when no display exists.
skip_wayland_correlationfalse
Skip KMS/Wayland correlation; leave false unless your compositor omits output metadata.
latency_modesafe
safe or aggressive latency-first media behavior.

sunshine.conf

1min_log_level = 12busy_poll_us = 503rate_cap_pct = 904enet_4mib_buffer = true5pipewire_latency_ms = 66cpu_pinning = true7dscp_qos = true8latency_mode = aggressive

apps.json: per-application encoder override

1{2  "name": "Competitive profile",3  "cmd": "steam steam://rungameid/730",4  "encoder-preset": 05}6 7// -1 host default, 0 latency, 1 balanced, 2 quality

Audio FX

Pre-encoder DSP on the host

SolarFlare runs a lightweight audio pre-processor between the PipeWire capture callback and the Opus encoder. Every stage is opt-in and off by default, so a vanilla install matches upstream until you turn a stage on in the Web UI.

PipeWire capture

AGC

VAD

Ducking

Noise gate

Opus encoder

sf_audio_agc

Automatic gain control

Measures the RMS level of each frame and rides a smooth gain correction toward a target loudness (-20 dBFS by default), clamped between configurable min and max gain with attack, hold, and release timing.

sf_audio_vad

Voice activity detection

Classifies each frame as speech or non-speech using a threshold plus a hysteresis band and minimum speech/silence durations. VAD alone does not change the audio; it produces the voice-active signal that ducking and gating consume.

sf_audio_ducking

Speech ducking

When you talk, game audio is attenuated (-12 dB by default) so speech stays intelligible during loud gameplay, ramping in and out smoothly to avoid audible pumping.

sf_audio_noise_gate

Noise gate

Zeroes any frame below the threshold to kill constant background hiss, fan noise, or open-mic floor noise, and leaves louder content alone.

sf_opus_*

Opus encoder tuning

Full control over the audio codec: LOWDELAY / VOIP / AUDIO application mode, CBR or VBR, complexity, in-band FEC with an expected-loss hint, and fullband bandwidth extension.

All 24 sf_audio_* / sf_opus_*keys are exposed in the Web UI's Audio / Video tab and validated by a source-to-docs consistency test.

Install

Build from source for new installs

New users should always run ./scripts/linux-install.sh. The installer detects Arch/CachyOS, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora-family, openSUSE, Bazzite, and NixOS. Then open https://localhost:47990, accept the host-local certificate, and pair a Moonlight client.

Release binaries are only for updating an already working SolarFlare install. Prefer Update now in the Web UI (tarball) when available. The bare sunshine-x86_64 download is the executable only and does not install the Web UI, desktop files, shaders, udev rules, or the systemd user unit.

Fresh source installation

1git clone --recursive https://github.com/vindeckyy/Solar-Flare.git2cd Solar-Flare3./scripts/linux-install.sh4systemctl --user enable --now app-dev.lizardbyte.app.Sunshine.service

Existing-install binary fallback

1systemctl --user stop app-dev.lizardbyte.app.Sunshine.service2sudo curl --fail --location --output /usr/local/bin/sunshine https://github.com/vindeckyy/Solar-Flare/releases/latest/download/sunshine-x86_643sudo chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/sunshine4sudo setcap 'cap_sys_admin,cap_sys_nice+p' /usr/local/bin/sunshine5systemctl --user start app-dev.lizardbyte.app.Sunshine.service

SolarFlare keeps the executable name, service identifier, ports, state format, and ~/.config/sunshine directory used by Sunshine, so existing Moonlight pairings keep working after the switch.