What does the “aapl,panic-info” output from “nvram -p” mean?

Question

When I run nvram -p I get the following:

$ nvram -p | cut -c1-30
aapl,panic-info %f0%b0;=F%8d%e
BootCampHD  %02%01%0c%00%d0A%03
boot-image  %02%01%0c%00%d0A%03
SystemAudioVolume   W

The line with panic-info is actually ~9000 characters long. What does this mean? Should I be worried, as the word 'panic' implies?

Answer 1

The line panic-info is the details of the last kernel panic registered and stored by the system. If you do a PRAM (or NVRAM) reset, those details will be removed.

For example, I just ran nvram -p and I had no panic-info line because I did a PRAM reset since my last kernel panic. I can't even remember the last time I had a kernel panic.

Hope that clears it up for you.