WHEA - Windows Hardware Error Architecture

Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA) provides a common infrastructure for handling hardware errors on Windows platforms. WHEA is intended to reduce mean-time-to-recovery for fatal hardware errors through richer error reporting and to reduce system crashes related to hardware errors through effective operating system hardware error recovery and health monitoring. WHEA enables the Windows operating system to effectively utilize existing and future hardware error standards, such as the Processor Machine Check Architecture (MCA) and PCI Express Advance Error Reporting (AER).

WHEA provides:

• A generic error source discovery mechanism

• A common hardware error record format and error handling flow

• A persistence mechanism for preserving error records

• A hardware error eventing model based on Event Tracing for Windows (ETW)

The initial implementation of WHEA focuses on platform hardware devices, including processor, memory, cache, and system interconnects such as PCI, PCI-X, and PCI Express. Peripheral device errors remain under the control of their respective device drivers.

For complete details about WHEA, see the WHEA Platform Design Guide, which is available to server and firmware developers under NDA. For more information about the WHEA Platform Design Guide, contact us at wheafb@microsoft.com.

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