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.