Book Updates and Errata. Performance Analysis and Tuning on Modern CPUs (Second Edition)

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I will use this page to provide updates and errata for the second edition of my book “Performance Analysis and Tuning on Modern CPUs”.

Updates and General Information

11-Nov-2024: The book is now available on Amazon.

22-Nov-2024: Hardcover and Kindle versions are available.

03-Dec-2024: The PDF version is available for downloading from GitHub.

Errata

See a list of opened Github Issues.

Note: The page numbers in the printed and PDF versions of the book differ by one. If you can’t find the referenced text on the given page, try checking the page before or after.

22-Nov-2024: A couple of readers of the paperback version have reported that there are some blurry pages and some pages have purple-ish text color (instead of black). I acknowledge this issue and I’m trying to fix it. The hardcover version (with premium color printing) seems not to have this problem. It turns out to be an issue with the LaTeX to PDF conversion. Some details are here: https://www.kdpcommunity.com/s/question/0D7at0000022jCnCAI.

24-Dec-2024: The following link on page 253 (Chapter 11, PGO) is outdated: https://github.com/google/llvm-propeller/blob/plo-dev/Propeller_RFC.pdf, use the following link instead: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3575693.3575727.

24-Dec-2024: Bad image formatting in Appendix: some images cover the text.

24-Dec-2024: The following link on page 332 (Appendix C, Intel PT) is outdated: https://sites.google.com/site/intelptmicrotutorial/.

20-May-2025: The following link in the footnote on page 252 (“HFSort in LLD”) is broken: https://github.com/llvm-project/lld/blob/master/ELF/CallGraphSort.cpp. Here is the correct link: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/lld/ELF/CallGraphSort.cpp.

02-Jun-2025: Typo in Chapter 4 Section 10. (Link)

06-Jun-2025: Figure 3.13 is incorrect; the bits in the figure sum up to 73 (16 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 21) while they should sum up to 64.

OLD: Figure 3.13: Virtual address that points within a 2MB page.

NEW: Figure 3.13: Virtual address that points within a 2MB page.

09-Jun-2025: Error in Section 5.5 “The Roofline Performance Model”: peak memory bandwidth should be in GB, not in GiB.

22-Jul-2025: Error in Section 8.4 “Transparent Huge Pages” on page 203: in Listing 8.8, the mmap call won’t fail (unless it can’t find a 4KB chunk), so it’s inaccurate to say that mmap will fail if it can’t find a 2MB chunk. The mmap call doesn’t demand a huge page, so it’ll default to being a regular-sized page. The following madvise call is only a suggestion and the kernel doesn’t have to honour it, so that would return 0 (success) whether there’s any contiguous 2MB chunk or not.

23-Jul-2025: Error in Section 12.3.1 “Avoid Minor Page Faults” on page 274: “The very first write to a newly allocated page triggers a minor page fault, a hardware interrupt that is handled by the OS.” Page fault is not a hardware interrupt. It should be written as “[..] page fault, a hardware exception that is [..]”

24-Jul-2025: Error in Section 8.4.2 “Transparent Huge Pages” on page 203 in Listing 8.8: PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE | PROT_EXEC - this makes the pages readable, writeable and executable. Considering modern exploitation techniques, PROT_EXEC should be excluded since a user has no intention to execute code from the allocated pages.

10-Nov-2025: There is an UB in “Listing 10.6 Find the longest line”. Quote from perf-book:96: “the code might be incorrect when there are more than 1 newliner \n in 8-byte chunks. Since we are shifting mask after we find a newliner, eolPos is a relative position (relative to mask) in this chunk. But uint32_t curLen = (pos - lineBeginPos) + eolPos; is an absolute position.” The fix is in the PR.