Website | LVGL Open | LVGL Pro | Contact
LVGL Safe is a certification-ready UI Library for safety-critical products.
It ships with the documentation and verification evidence that feeds directly into your
product's own certification process, across four target industries:
Automotive, Medical, Industrial, and Avionics.
Overview • LVGL Safe vs LVGL Open • Standards • Delivery • Licensing • Timeline • Get in Touch
Important
A testable library with a user-guide is coming soon.
- Built for safety-critical systems: written from the ground up with safety as the north star. Certification-driven development, safety manuals, and zero external dependencies.
- Certification ready: compatible with ISO 26262, IEC 62304, IEC 61508, and DO-178C, with the artifacts that support your own qualification effort.
- Small footprint, same performance: minimal memory usage through functional widgets instead of image blending, without giving up the look and responsiveness you expect from LVGL.
- Accessible source code: full visibility into the codebase, so you can audit, verify, and trust every line before you ship a critical device.
- Complete delivery: not a stripped-down variant you have to qualify from scratch, but source, documentation, and the evidence trail your auditors will ask for.
LVGL Safe is not a fork of LVGL Open. It is a new library, written from scratch in C99 with safety as the north star from the first commit. None of the open-source codebase was carried over, because a certifiable library has to be designed around its requirements (no runtime allocation, no hidden global state, deterministic rendering, full requirement-to-test traceability), and those properties cannot be retrofitted onto a general-purpose GUI engine by trimming it down.
The two libraries share a name, an author, and a design philosophy, but they solve different problems and make opposite trade-offs. LVGL Open optimizes for features and developer velocity; LVGL Safe optimizes for predictability, auditability, and evidence.
| Aspect | LVGL Open | LVGL Safe |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rich, general-purpose GUI | Certifiable, auditable UI for safety-critical products |
| Codebase | C | C |
| Source & licensing | Free and public under MIT | Source available under a commercial agreement, per product |
| Feature set | Broad: 30+ widgets, everything a modern UI needs | Deliberately smaller: every feature must be justifiable and verifiable |
| Reliability | Community-tested, production-proven | Highest priority: MISRA C:2012, deterministic behavior, ~95% test coverage, full traceability |
| Memory | Dynamic allocation at runtime | No runtime allocation; the caller owns every struct and buffer |
| Object lifecycle | Widgets created and deleted freely | Create only: widgets live for the lifetime of the program |
| Global state | Global/default display and registries | No internal global or static state |
| Styling & layout | Cascading styles, themes, flex and grid | Explicit per-widget fields, per-state colors, absolute positioning |
| Rendering | Multiple draw units, GPU and HW acceleration | One deterministic software renderer |
| Dependencies | Optional integrations (filesystems, decoders, libraries) | C99 and the standard library only |
| Portability | Fully portable to any MCU/MPU and any (RT)OS | Fully portable to any MCU/MPU and any (RT)OS |
| Documentation | Docs and examples | Docs plus safety manual, verification report, traceability, SBOM |
| Tooling | LVGL Pro Editor | LVGL Pro Editor |
What LVGL Safe gives you today: a software renderer writing into a framebuffer you own;
multiple displays and screens; rectangle, label, button, image, image button, and arc widgets;
pointer and touch input with press, pressing, and click events plus index-based focus handling;
multi-language translations and value binding on labels; image rotation and perspective transforms;
offline image and font converters, so nothing is decoded at runtime; and a screenshot-based
regression test framework. Everything is selected at compile time in a single ls_conf.h, and
every public function returns an explicit error code.
If you need a full-featured GUI for a general-purpose product, use LVGL Open. It stays free, open, and actively developed. Choose LVGL Safe when your product has to be certified, and when predictable, allocation-free, reviewable code matters more than breadth of features.
| Industry | Standard | Supported up to |
|---|---|---|
| Automotive | ISO 26262 | ASIL B |
| Medical | IEC 62304 | Class B |
| Industrial | IEC 61508 | SIL 2 |
| Avionics | DO-178C | DAL C |
| Document | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Datasheet | High-level technical overview of LVGL Safe: supported standards, configurations, resource footprint, and performance characteristics. The at-a-glance summary an evaluator reads first. |
| Integration manual | Step-by-step guidance for bringing LVGL Safe into a target system: porting, configuration, build setup, and the interfaces the integrator is responsible for. |
| Safety manual | The core safety document. Defines the assumptions of use, safety-related constraints, and the conditions under which LVGL Safe's safety claims hold. |
| API reference | Complete specification of every public function: parameters, return values, expected behavior, and any safety-relevant usage notes. |
| Verification report | Evidence that the software was tested against its requirements: test cases, results, and coverage data. |
| Traceability summary | A mapping from requirements through design to tests, showing each requirement is implemented and verified with no gaps. A key artifact auditors look for. |
| Document | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Release notes | What this specific release contains: changes, fixes, and known limitations, so you can assess impact and qualify the exact version you ship. |
| License & notices | The licensing terms for LVGL Safe and a record of any third-party components included, along with their respective licenses and obligations. |
| SBOM | A complete inventory of components, versions, and dependencies in the delivery, supporting supply-chain transparency and security review. |
| Security policy | How vulnerabilities are reported, triaged, and patched, and the maintenance commitment over the product's deployed lifetime. |
| Delivery manifest | An itemized list of everything in the delivery, with checksums and signatures confirming the artifacts received are exactly what LVGL shipped. |
| Support & warranty | The support scope, response expectations, and warranty conditions that apply to LVGL Safe. |
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| July 2026 | Early Access opens. |
| August 2026 | Source code preview: priority access ahead of GA. |
| October 2026 | Early Access closes: last date to reserve a slot. |
| December 2026 | Full delivery: docs, artifacts, evidence. Start building. |
Building a safety-critical product and wondering how LVGL Safe fits into it? Talk to us.
Contact us or email lvgl@lvgl.io. Tell us your target standard, certification level, and timeline, and we will walk you through the delivery and reserve your Early Access slot.