[LEAPSECS] Crunching Bulletin B numbers (POSIX time)

Ian Batten igb at batten.eu.org
Wed Feb 23 05:53:40 EST 2011



>

> Having a known list of leap seconds let one recover TAI time from a cold GPS receiver in a few seconds to a minute, rather than waiting ~20 minutes for the almanac to download. Many systems have their internal clocks in TAI, but also have requirements to report time in UTC to users. Such a table would ensure these systems could come back online quickly without having to pay the 20 minute penalty. While the system may have already been down a little while when the swap is made, an extra 20 minutes can kill reliability targets for the system.


Hang on. Let's unpick that scenario. How long would a machine have to be down such that a cached copy of the almanac no longer contained already applied leap seconds?

ian



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