Windows Hardware Error Architecture

Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA) is a hardware error handling framework introduced for Microsoft Windows with Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 as a successor to Machine Check Architecture (MCA) on previous versions of Windows.^[1] WHEA consists of several software components that interact with the hardware and firmware of a given platform to handle and notify regarding hardware error conditions.^[2] Collectively, these components provide: a generic means of discovering errors, a common error report format for those errors, a way of preserving error records, and an error event model based on Event Tracing for Windows (ETW).^[3]

WHEA allows third-party software to interact with the operating system and react to certain hardware events. For example, when a new CPU is added to a running system—a Windows Server feature known as Dynamic Hardware Partitioning—the hardware error component stack is notified that a new processor was installed.

WHEA builds on existing hardware error reporting mechanisms, including PCI Express Advanced Error Reporting and firmware-provided interfaces such as the ACPI Platform Error Interface (APEI), introduced in ACPI 5.0. On Linux systems, APEI is implemented directly within the kernel,^[4] whereas Windows integrates APEI error sources through WHEA.^[5]