We have a kernel build regression since 3.1-rc1, which is about 10%
regression. The kernel source is in an ext3 filesystem.
Alex Shi bisect it to commit:
commit a07405b7
Author: Justin TerAvest <teravest@google.com>
Date:   Sun Jul 10 22:09:19 2011 +0200

    cfq: Remove special treatment for metadata rqs.

Apparently this is caused by lack metadata preemption, where ext3/ext4
do use READ_META. I didn't see a way to fix the issue, so suggest
reverting the patch.

This reverts commit a07405b7.

Reported-by: Alex Shi<alex.shi@intel.com>
Reported-by: Shaohua Li<shaohua.li@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>