A processing system may include an operating system (OS) and one or more specialized error handling modules to be registered with the OS after the processing system is powered on. The OS may also include a master policy module. The specialized error handling module may collect error data from a component of the processing system, and may generate abstracted error data, based at least in part on the collected error data. The master policy module may determine a recovery action to be taken, based at least in part on the abstracted error data. The OS may also include an error collection routine that calls one or more specialized error handling modules in response to detecting a hardware error. The error collection routine may also retrieve information from firmware in response to detecting the hardware error. Other embodiments are described and claimed.