Jason, If it is suitable for your application, I'd highly recommend implementing a callback-based asynchronous serial RX. Has a great little example of how to implement asynch serial with a timeout. As you recognised, it will require a multi-threaded implementation to get the performance advantages, so you will need to put some thought where your recieved data will be buffered to make sure you aren't doing a lot of copying. As far as the boost::streambuff stuff goes, I personally prefer just to block out some memory as a char array - char m_RXBuffer[m_RXBuffSize] and use boost::asio::buffer(m_RXBuffer, m_RXBuffSize) to pass the target buffer into async_read_some. In particular for RS232, I have always found the fact that the underlying data is a stream of bytes naturally maps a lot better onto a simple char array than any of the more complex data structures. Paul Carter Base Building Manuals there.

I'm want to check for incoming data packages on the serial port, using boost.asio. Each data packet will start with a header that is one byte long, and will specify.