The UARTs have no FIFOs, so if interrupts are disabled
for more than a character time (10 usec at 1 Mbit/sec)
then characters get dropped.

The overhead for handling a UART ISR is about 0.5 usec,
so even at baud rates of 1 Mbit/sec this only corresponds
to about 5% of the CPU. Lower baud rates will have less
of an impact.