LinSight

The fast, modular Linux system-monitoring dashboard.
Watch CPU, memory, multi-GPU, storage, network, and sensors — live, in one place.
Rust core · Qt 6 / Kirigami UI · CLI + GUI · runtime .so plugins · mTLS remote · no telemetry · GPL-3.0-only.

---

Screenshots

Overview: live CPU, memory, temperature, and frequency at a glance.

Multi-GPU: NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel (xe + i915) side by side.	Network: per-interface link speed, state, and throughput.
Hardware: every device, with editable per-device nicknames.	Screenshots are captured by ./scripts/dev_screenshot.sh <page>, which drives LinSight's own QQuickWindow::grabWindow() path so the frame is independent of compositor focus.

---

What is LinSight?

LinSight answers the everyday "what is my machine doing right now?" question. It samples your hardware and kernel and shows it back to you live — as tiles you can rearrange, a scriptable CLI, or a Prometheus feed.

It is built around three goals:

• Linux-native and low-overhead. A pure-Rust daemon with no async runtime in the hot path (sync + polling only), sampling on demand and serving clients over a postcard-framed Unix socket.
• Multi-GPU first. First-class sensors for NVIDIA (NVML), AMD (amdgpu), and Intel (xe + i915) GPUs — temperature, utilization, memory, power, and processes, per device.
• Extensible and scriptable. Everything the GUI shows is also a linsight-cli subcommand, and new metric sources drop in as runtime .so plugins (ABI v6) without recompiling the daemon.

What it monitors today:

• GPUs: NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel (xe + i915), with per-device nicknames.
• System: CPU, memory, NVMe, disk, filesystem, network, hwmon, ZRAM, processes, systemd units, and PSI / load / uptime.
• Runtime plugins: drop a .so in to add sensors; the bundled sensors are themselves in-tree plugins. Per-plugin TOML config.
• Custom dashboards & themes: preset pages (Overview / GPUs / Storage / Network / Hardware) plus a drag-and-drop canvas editor.
• Alerts: evalexpr rules with an exec:<argv> notifier (no shell injection).
• History & metrics: optional SQLite history and a Prometheus exporter with a stable device_key label.
• Remote: an mTLS bridge (linsight-tunnel) for non-SSH topologies.

---

Try it

GUI

cargo run -p linsight
# Kirigami window with a left sidebar:
#   Workspace → Overview / GPUs / Storage / Network / Hardware / Editor
#   System    → Settings / About
# Auto-spawns linsightd as a child if no daemon is running.

Keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+1..5 for the workspace pages, F1 for About, StandardKey.Preferences for Settings.

CLI

just run-daemon                     # or let the GUI spawn it
just run-cli list                   # sensor catalogue (52+ entries)
just run-cli read cpu.util --count 5
just run-cli read mem.used_bytes --count 3
just run-cli plugin new my-sensor   # scaffold a third-party plugin
just run-cli db stats               # row count, sensors, time span, file size
just run-cli db prune --older-than 7d          # delete rows older than 7 days
just run-cli db prune --older-than 7d --vacuum # also reclaim file space

Remote (mTLS, non-SSH topologies)

# On the remote machine running linsightd. Default bind is
# 127.0.0.1:9443; pass --bind 0.0.0.0:9443 to expose to the network.
linsight-tunnel server \
  --bind 0.0.0.0:9443 \
  --cert server.pem --key server.key --ca clients-ca.pem \
  --socket /run/user/1000/linsight.sock

# On your desktop:
linsight-tunnel client \
  --listen $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/linsight-remote.sock \
  --server remote.host.example:9443 \
  --cert client.pem --key client.key --ca server-ca.pem

Any LinSight client then connects to the local socket as usual; bytes are piped over mTLS to the remote daemon. See apps/linsight-tunnel/README.md for a topology diagram, an openssl cert recipe, and the trust-model caveats. For most remote use, an SSH-forwarded socket (ssh -L $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/linsight.sock:remote-runtime/linsight.sock host) is simpler and equally secure.

Remote host switching in the GUI

The Settings page lets you save remote hosts (ssh://[user@]host[:port]) and switch between them from the sidebar dropdown. Hosts are persisted in ~/.config/linsight/hosts.json. Selecting a host reconnects the GUI to that daemon; a failed reconnect keeps the previous connection alive and shows an error banner. You can also launch straight to a remote host with linsight --connect ssh://user@host. Key-based SSH authentication is assumed; the trust model is the same as using ssh -L manually.

---

Build

LinSight is a standard Cargo workspace (resolver 3, edition 2024, stable Rust pinned via rust-toolchain.toml). Everything goes through just; direct cargo invocations are equivalent if just isn't installed.

just ci              # fmt-check + clippy -D warnings + tests (the CI gate)
just test-release    # same tests in release mode (catches opt-level bugs)
just bench           # Criterion benchmarks for protocol/core hot paths
just build           # debug
just build-release   # release: lto=fat, codegen-units=1, strip
just build-release-v3   # x86_64-v3 tuned (CachyOS / modern systems)

GUI smoke (headless, requires xvfb-run):

just gui-smoke       # builds release GUI and runs under xvfb + llvmpipe

Optional preflight (install with cargo install cargo-deny cargo-audit cargo-about):

just preflight       # ci + deny + audit
just credits         # cargo about generate → docs/third-party-notices.md

---

Install

Install LinSight as a pacman-tracked package rather than hand-copying binaries into /usr/. For local development, build the working tree and install it via pacman:

cd packaging/arch
makepkg -si -p PKGBUILD.local        # build the working tree, install via pacman

Target	Command
Arch (local dev)	makepkg -si -p packaging/arch/PKGBUILD.local
Arch (release)	makepkg -si -p packaging/arch/PKGBUILD (from a tag)

PKGBUILD.local lays down the binaries, desktop entry, metainfo, the user systemd unit, hicolor icons, and /usr/lib/linsight/plugins. Manage it like any package — pacman -Qi linsight to inspect, sudo pacman -R linsight to remove.

---

Always-on mode (opt-in)

packaging/systemd/linsight.service is a systemd user unit. Enable it once to keep the daemon resident; the GUI / CLI then attach to the existing socket. Always-on mode also gates the optional surfaces — history (LINSIGHT_HISTORY), alerts (LINSIGHT_ALERTS), and the Prometheus exporter (LINSIGHT_PROM_BIND), all off by default. The Settings page shows each subsystem's env-var status.

When history is enabled, LINSIGHT_HISTORY_RETENTION controls how long samples are kept. The format is an integer with a d, h, or m suffix (e.g. 30d, 12h, 45m). Unset defaults to 30d; 0 keeps rows forever. An unparseable value logs a warning and falls back to 30d. The daemon prunes rows older than the window at most once per hour, with the first prune ~5 minutes after startup. The database file does not shrink after pruning — freed pages are reused; use linsight-cli db prune --vacuum for offline space reclamation.

---

Architecture

• apps/linsightd/ — daemon; hosts plugins, schedules subscription-driven sampling, serves clients over a postcard-framed Unix socket. Optional history (SQLite), alerts (evalexpr), Prometheus exporter.
• apps/linsight-gui/ — Qt 6 / Kirigami GUI via cxx-qt 0.8. Sidebar shell, preset pages, canvas editor, multi-window. Auto-spawns the daemon if none is listening.
• apps/linsight-tunnel/ — mTLS bridge for the daemon socket (server / client subcommands; transparent byte pipe). The only binary that uses tokio — never the daemon hot path.
• crates/linsight-core/ — shared types and dashboard model (no I/O).
• crates/linsight-protocol/ — postcard wire format + framing.
• crates/linsight-plugin-sdk/ — public LinsightPlugin trait + export_plugin! macro. ABI v6 uses R-mirror types on the FFI boundary for cross-rustc safety; see docs/adr/0001-plugin-abi-stabby-deferral.md.
• crates/linsight-sensors/* — one in-tree plugin per hardware family / metric source (cpu, mem, net, nvme, nvml, xe, amdgpu, i915, disk, fs, hwmon, proc, system, systemd, zram, smart, sock).
• crates/linsight-cli/ — list / read / plugin {new, install, ls, remove} / db {stats, prune} (offline history-DB inspection and maintenance; works without a running daemon).
• examples/echo-plugin/ — minimal third-party plugin built as a cdylib; exercised by the SDK's tests/dynamic_load.rs.

See docs/architecture.md for the full process model and data flow.

---

Contribute

Patches, bug reports, and design feedback are welcome. The full guide — fork → branch → PR flow, coding standards, and commit style — lives in CONTRIBUTING.md. Quick rules of thumb:

• Branch from master, send a PR.
• Run just ci locally before pushing — it must pass (it's the same gate CI runs).
• LinSight is GPL-3.0-only; new dependencies must use a license in deny.toml's allowlist.

Bugs / feature requests: GitHub issues.

---

Documentation

• Architecture
• Alerts
• Plugin ABI ADR-0001
• Remote tunnel
• Security
• Third-party credits

---

License

GPL-3.0-only. See LICENSE. Third-party license credits live in docs/third-party-notices.md.