Deadlock-avoidance in a page-parallel batch rasterizer
Yitzhak Birk · 1990
A rasterizer converts a document described in some page-description language into a sequence of fill-page bitmaps (pagemaps), which can then be printed or displayed. The Page-Parallel rasterizer harnesses multiple processors to work on the same document. Any given page, however, is processed by a single processor, hence the name. For performance reasons, it is desirable to permit out-of-order rasterization. However, this can result in deadlock. This paper shows how to pace the rasterizer so as to avoid deadlock without being overly restrictive. In so doing, we eztend previously-proposed deadlock-avoidance schemes to cases which seem to be outside their scope, and our approach may also be useful in other applications.