Patent ID: 7080174

Claim:
A method for managing the processing of commands issued on a bus via a plurality of agents, comprising: allocating ownership of the bus among the plurality of agents based on a predetermined bus arbitration order; queuing agent identifiers of the agents that issued commands which were retried due to unavailable processing resources, wherein an agent having a queued agent identifier is a queued agent; and overriding the predetermined bus arbitration order and granting ownership of the bus among the queued agents over other agents seeking ownership of the bus and issuing commands not retried, wherein ownership of the bus is granted among the queued agents in an order in which the queued agent identifiers were queued relative to each other, and the overriding of the predetermined bus arbitration order and the granting of ownership of the bus among the queued agents satisfies a configurable ratio of a number of grants of ownership to the other agents seeking ownership of the bus and issuing commands not retried, to a number of grants of ownership to queued agents.