I hope someone who actually knows about this will jump in, but in the meantime I'll give the wheel a whirl.

A quick search on Google using linux ebda reveals that the error message refers to the Extended BIOS Data Area, which I gather is RAM used to make up for deficiencies in BIOS.

In other words Dodge (that is, RAM - Dodge Ram - a pun ) isn't big enought for the two of them (EBDA and whatever). The situation seems to arise when there's a piece of hardware that needs help getting up and running such as a SCSI drive on a SCSI bus or a hard drive that's larger than the BIOS can handle.

Why would this error come up now, when you haven't changed hardware? Possibly something in 3.7, wanting to be even more useful than it was in 3.4, is using up more RAMland.

Which kernel did you install? I understand that with 2.6 there's a change in how CD drives can be handled. Before, they were treated as SCSI devices on ATA busses and required some emulation, but that's no longer needed. I can see a scenario where enabling both ways of handling them would use more RAM.

-- Ed