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<section xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" 
         xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
         xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" 
         version="5.0" 
         xml:id="sec_rtas_error_reporting_intro">

  <title>Introduction</title>
  
  <para>This section describes the data formats used to report events and
  errors from RTAS to the OS. A common format is used for errors and events
  to simplify software both in RTAS and in the OS. Both errors and events
  may have been analyzed to some degree by RTAS, and value judgments may
  have been applied to decide how serious an error is, or even how to
  describe it to the OS. These judgments are made by platform providers,
  since only they know enough about the hardware to decide how serious a
  problem it is, whether and how to recover from it, and how to map it onto
  the abstracted set of events and errors that a system is required to know
  about. There will be cases with some platforms where no reasonable
  mapping exists, and platform features may not be fully supported by the
  OS. In such cases, error reports may also be non-specific, leaving
  platform-specific details to platform-aware software.</para>
  
</section>