Patent ID: 7680944

Claim:
A device server system comprising: serial devices; a device server for connecting the serial devices to a local area network, the device server comprising: a FIFO register associated with each serial device, and a memory queue associated with each serial device; driver software installed on a host computer with an operating system that is connected to a local area network, the driver software for directing serial port data onto the local area network; and firmware installed on the device server for facilitating communication between the host computer and a selected one of the serial devices, wherein the firmware directs the serial port data received from the remote computer to the selected one of the serial devices, and wherein the firmware writes portions of the received serial port data to the FIFO register associated with the selected one of the serial devices, if the memory queue associated with the selected one of the serial devices is empty, before writing remaining data of the received serial port data to the memory queue associated with the selected one of the serial devices.