[NovemberWhiskey]

"Soft" realtime just means that you have a time-utility function that doesn't step-change to zero at an a priori deadline. Virtually everything in the real world is at least a soft realtime system.

I don't disagree with you that it's a realtime problem, I do however think that "just" is doing a lot of work there.

[AlotOfReading]

There are multiple ways to deal with deadline misses for soft systems. Only some of them actually deliver the correct data, just late. A lot of systems will abort the execution and move on with zeros/last computed data instead, or drop the data entirely. A modern network AQM system like CAKE uses both delayed scheduling and intelligent dropping.

Agreed though, "just" is hiding quite a deep rabbit hole.