Method, apparatus and system for reduced channel starvation in a DMA engine

Techniques for generating information identifying a next direct memory access (DMA) task to be serviced. In an embodiment, arbitration logic provides a sequence of masking logic to determine, according to a hierarchy of rules, a next task to be serviced by a DMA engine. In certain embodiments, masking logic includes logic to mask information representing pending tasks to be serviced, the masking based on identification of a channel as being a suspended channel and/or a victim channel.