Not sure about the specifics, but I have been running ROS on a gumstix,
with data reception on my intel laptop and I have not noticed any data
corruption. The data being sent was mostly floating point numbers.

Best.

Oh indeed - ros has their own serialisation code, not boost. We've had no problem with floats/doubles on messages between an armv5/armv6 core and intel machines as well. Couple of hitches with rpc stuff, but that's a different issue.