How to find out the value of 1 iteration in microblaze - xilinx

I am trying to find out a way to increase the computation time of a function to 1 second without using the sleep function in xilinx microblaze, using the xilkernel.
Hence, may i know how many iterations do i need to do in a simple for loop to increase the computation time to 1 second?

You can't do this reliably and accurately. If you want do a bodge like this, you'll have to calibrate it yourself for your particular system as Microblaze is so configurable, there isn't one right answer. The bodgy way is:
Set up a GPIO peripheral, set one of the pins to '1', run a loop of 1000 iterations (make sure the compiler doesn't optimise it away!) set the pins to '0'. Hang a scope off that pin (you're doing work on embedded systems, you do have a scope, right?) and see how long it takes to run the loop.
But the right way to do it is to use a hardware timer peripheral. Even at a very simple level, you could clear the timer at the start of the function, then poll it at the end until it reaches whatever value corresponds to 1 second. This will still have some imperfections, but given that you haven't specified how close to 1 sec you need to be, it is probably adequate.

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Prometheus increase not handling process restarts

I am trying to figure out the behavior of Prometheus' increase() querying function with process restarts.
When there is a process restart within a 2m interval and I query:
sum(increase(my_metric_total[2m]))
I get a value less than expected.
For example, in a simple experiment I mock:
3 lcm_restarts
1 process restart
2 lcm_restarts
All within a 2 minute interval.
Upon querying:
sum(increase(lcm_restarts[2m]))
I receive a value of ~4.5 when I am expecting 5.
lcm_restarts graph
sum(increase(lcm_restarts[2m])) result
Could someone please explain?
Pretty concise and well-prepared first question here. Please keep this spirit!
When working with counters, functions as rate(), irate() and also increase() are adjusting on resets due to restarts. Other than the name suggests, the increase() function does not calculate the absolute increase in the given time frame but is a different way to write rate(metric[interval]) * number_of_seconds_in_interval. The rate() function takes the first and the last measurement in a series and calculates the per-second increase in the given time. This is the reason why you may observe non-integer increases even if you always increase in full numbers as the measurements are almost never exactly at the start and end of the interval.
For more details about this, please have a look at the prometheus docs for the increase() function. There are also some good hints on what and what not to do when working with counters in the robust perception blog.
Having a look at your label dimensions, I also think that counter resets don't apply to your constructed example. There is one label called reason that changed between the restarts and so created a second time series (not continuing the existing one). Here you are also basically summing up the rates of two different time series increases that (for themselves) both have their extrapolation happening.
So basically there isn't really anything wrong what you are doing, you just shouldn't rely on getting highly precise numbers out of prometheus for your use case.
Prometheus may return unexpected results from increase() function due to the following reasons:
Prometheus may return fractional results from increase() over integer counter because of extrapolation. See this issue for details.
Prometheus may return lower than expected results from increase(m[d]) because it doesn't take into account possible counter increase between the last raw sample just before the specified lookbehind window [d] and the first raw sample inside the lookbehind window [d]. See this article and this comment for details.
Prometheus skips the increase for the first sample in a time series. For example, increase() over the following series of samples would return 1 instead of 11: 10 11 11. See these docs for details.
These issues are going to be fixed according to this design doc. In the mean time it is possible to use other Prometheus-like systems such as VictoriaMetrics, which are free from these issues.

Get interation number in UMAT

Although it is easy to get the current step or increment number (variables KSTEP and KINC), I can't find an easy way to know the iteration number when inside the subroutine UMAT.
I know the following "if clause" will tell me if I'm in the first iteration of the first increment of the first step:
IF((KINC.EQ.1).AND.(SUM(STRAN+DSTRAN).EQ.0.0D0)) THEN
And I also know that I can get the iteration number writing to external files. However, is it possible to do it just inside the UMAT subroutine?
There is never really a reason to need to know the iteration number in a UMAT. If you think you need to know it, this is often a sign that you there is a better way to achieve what you want to know.
You can use a common block to track how often you enter a umat, and also which iteration you are on. But I really recommend against this. There is no good reason to know the iteration number. Unless your algorithm is perfect it will cause you more problems than it's worth.
Also in your code to check for the first increment - that will not tell you when you are in a real iteration, it will happen in PRE most likely.

calculate time to arrive in a procedure

I want to determine necessary time to execute a procedure, time value must be returned in the first instruction in this procedure, like this:
procedure myProcedure;
begin
// determine necessary time here
//other instructions
end;
First, of all, is this possible? if yes, how can I do this?
Thanks for your replies
In general you cannot expect to do this. Unless you have carefully profiled the code on the machine on which you run it, under the exact conditions in which it runs. Without that information there's no way to reliably predict run time up front.
You actually want to display progress. Typically you do that by keeping track of how the overall task is progressing. If the task is made up of 50 similarly sized sub tasks, then you can measure proportion complete simply by knowing how many sub tasks are complete.
That's the normal way to measure progress for a progress bar. If you wish to estimate time to completion then make a note of when the task starts. Then, as worl proceeds, you can use simple maths to work out an estimate of the time remaining. If the first 10 sub tasks took 30 seconds, then estimate that the next 10 will take another 30 seconds.

How does OpenTSDB downsample data

I have a 2 part question regarding downsampling on OpenTSDB.
The first is I was wondering if anyone knows whether OpenTSDB takes the last end point inclusive or exclusive when it calculates downsampling, or does it count the end data point twice?
For example, if my time interval is 12:30pm-1:30pm and I get DPs every 5 min starting at 12:29:44pm and my downsample interval is summing every 10 minute block, does the system take the DPs from 12:30-12:39 and summing them, 12:40-12:49 and sum them, etc or does it take the DPs from 12:30-12:40, then from 12:40-12:50, etc. Yes, I know my data is off by 15 sec but I don't control that.
I've tried to calculate it by hand but the data I have isn't helping me. The numbers I'm calculating aren't adding up to the above, nor is it matching what the graph is showing. I don't have access to the system that's pushing numbers into OpenTSDB so I can't setup dummy data to check.
The second question is how does downsampling plot its points on the graph from my time range and downsample interval? I set downsample to sum 10 min blocks. I set my range to be 12:30pm-1:30pm. The graph shows the first point of the downsampled graph to start at 12:35pm. That makes logical sense.I change the range to be 12:24pm-1:29pm and expected the first point to start at 12:30 but the first point shown is 12:25pm.
Hopefully someone can answer these questions for me. In the meantime, I'll continue trying to find some data in my system that helps show/prove how downsampling should work.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Downsampling isn't currently working the way you expect, although since this is a reasonable and commonly made expectations, we are thinking of changing this in a later release of OpenTSDB.
You're assuming that if you ask for a "10 min sum", the data points will be summed up within each "round" (or "aligned") 10 minute block (e.g. 12:30-12:39 then 12:40-12:49 in your example), but that's not what happens. What happens is that the code will start a 10-minute block from whichever data point is the first one it finds. So if the first one is at time 12:29:44, then the code will sum all subsequent data points until 600 seconds later, meaning until 12:39:44.
Within each 600 second block, there may be a varying number of data points. Some blocks may have more data points than others. Some blocks may have unevenly spaced data points, e.g. maybe all the data points are within one second of each other at the beginning of the 600s block. So in order to decide what timestamp will result from the downsampling operation, the code uses the average timestamp of all the data points of the block.
So if all your data points are evenly spaced throughout your 600s block, the average timestamp will fall somewhere in the middle of the block. But if you have, say, all the data points are within one second of each other at the beginning of the 600s block, then the timestamp returned will reflect that by virtue of being an average. Just to be clear, the code takes an average of the timestamps regardless of what downsampling function you picked (sum, min, max, average, etc.).
If you want to experiment quickly with OpenTSDB without writing to your production system, consider setting up a single-node OpenTSDB instance. It's very easy to do as is shown in the getting started guide.

Lua task scheduling

I've been writing some scripts for a game, the scripts are written in Lua. One of the requirements the game has is that the Update method in your lua script (which is called every frame) may take no longer than about 2-3 milliseconds to run, if it does the game just hangs.
I solved this problem with coroutines, all I have to do is call Multitasking.RunTask(SomeFunction) and then the task runs as a coroutine, I then have to scatter Multitasking.Yield() throughout my code, which checks how long the task has been running for, and if it's over 2 ms it pauses the task and resumes it next frame. This is ok, except that I have to scatter Multitasking.Yield() everywhere throughout my code, and it's a real mess.
Ideally, my code would automatically yield when it's been running too long. So, Is it possible to take a Lua function as an argument, and then execute it line by line (maybe interpreting Lua inside Lua, which I know is possible, but I doubt it's possible if all you have is a function pointer)? In this way I could automatically check the runtime and yield if necessary between every single line.
EDIT:: To be clear, I'm modding a game, that means I only have access to Lua. No C++ tricks allowed.
check lua_sethook in the Debug Interface.
I haven't actually tried this solution myself yet, so I don't know for sure how well it will work.
debug.sethook(coroutine.yield,"",10000);
I picked the number arbitrarily; it will have to be tweaked until it's roughly the time limit you need. Keep in mind that time spent in C functions etc will not increase the instruction count value, so a loop will reach this limit far faster than calls to long-running C functions. It may be viable to set a far lower value and instead provide a function that sees how much os.clock() or similar has increased.

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