Robert Dailey wrote:

Would you recommend calling read_start() from its own thread and have it loop indefinitely? I believe this is what you originally suggested. However, I am curious about the issues with calling read_some() and write_some() from separate threads without using any external synchronization techniques (i.e. mutexes). Do I have to synchronize these two calls manually or is it done internally? I'll re-review the documentation, but I did not see anything regarding this earlier.

Thanks for your help.

The io_service takes care of the "threading" issues for you. Just
call read_start once from (lets say) main to get the processes going
and then it all happens in the background... asynchronously. The
call to read_start doesn't block. If you want different threads
to operate on the io (though I recommend not doing this at first)
then you can use a thread pool to call the io_service.run method
from multiple threads.

Have a look at some of the examples to see how it is all put
together. Reading/writing to serial ports is the same as reading/writing
to sockets using asio. I like to recommend the chat server/client
example. It pulls together a lot of asio concepts in an easy to
understand application.