Diagnostic query: Unexpected kernel panic on macOS Sequoia 15.1 after waking (1794603890)

The AppleThunderboltNHI assertion combined with IOPlatformPluginFamily strongly suggests a USB-PD contract renegotiation failure during the dark-wake transition, where the dock’s firmware stalls the ACPI _WAK path while the EC awaits a valid kIOPMSystemPowerStateCapabilities response. Verify the Thunderbolt/USB4 firmware revision on the dock via system_profiler SPThunderboltDataType | grep -A2 "Firmware Version" and cross-reference against the vendor’s latest security advisory for CVE-2024-xxxxx class PD controller deadlocks. As a hardware recovery step, force a hard EC reset by disconnecting all AC/DC sources (including the dock’s upstream power) for 30 seconds to clear the embedded controller’s non-volatile PD policy engine state. If the panic log shows Error 4013 or 0xE00002E9 adjacent to the NHI stack, it confirms a TBT/USB4 link training timeout rather than a filesystem event.

Filter the Unified Log for the 30-second window preceding the panic using log show --predicate 'eventMessage contains[c] "AppleThunderboltNHI" OR eventMessage contains[c] "IOPlatformPlugin" OR eventMessage contains[c] "Display" OR eventMessage contains[c] "DarkWake"' --last 1h --style syslog to identify if DCPAVFamily or AppleMuxControl is issuing a display reconfiguration before the NHI link is fully trained. The Sequoia 15.1 powerd daemon aggressively enforces DisplaySleep assertions; check pmset -g assertions immediately post-wake for PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep held by coreaudiod or WindowServer which blocks the NHI’s kIOMessageCanSystemSleep acknowledgment. Mitigate by disabling “Automatically adjust brightness” and “True Tone” in System Settings > Displays, then test with sudo pmset -a tcpkeepalive 0 and sudo pmset -a powernap 0 to eliminate network-induced dark wakes that race the TBT link initialization.