In examining I've found that under-allocation may be problematic, over-allocation of resources may also have issues.

In the original under-allocation definition of InStreamFromByteChannel, the bb buffer would only read a maximum of 4 times the sizeHint the class received as a parameter, which defaults to half a mebibyte.  Because there is no code to determine if more bytes exist in the buffer, this configuration runs the risk of underflow errors when parsing fields.

The following code corrects this by allocating a buffer of sufficient size to store everything available in the input stream in the bb buffer:

if (count == bb.capacity) {
// Buffer not big enough, allocate one 4 times larger and fill at offset
var tooSmall = scala.collection.mutable.ListBuffer.empty[ByteBuffer]
var lastWrite = 0
while (count == bb.capacity()) {
// Remember where we started
bb.flip()
bb.position(lastWrite)
    // Save old buffer and allocate anew
tooSmall += bb
bb = ByteBuffer.allocate(count * 4)
    // Leave space to copy the old buffers back to this one
bb.position(count)
lastWrite = count
    // Read in as much as possible
count += in.read(bb)
}
// bb now holds enough space for the entire buffer starting from a position at the end of the previous buffer's size
// so copy over the other buffers in tooSmall to fill in the gap
bb.flip()
tooSmall.foreach(b => { bb.put(b) } )
bb.position(0)
}
else {
// Buffer is sufficiently sized
bb.flip()
}

The problem with this solution is that it has the potential to grossly over-allocate a buffer just to store the entire contents of the stream.

What's ideally desired is something more akin to a sliding window that only loads enough data at any given time to satisfy the current field request.  In other words, it should only allocate more space in a lazy, just in time fashion.

Unfortunately, this change would negate the test case for TestBufferAllocations in sub-projects/core/srcTest/daffodil/dsom/TestBufferAllocation.scala and it's not yet clear how to inject a custom sizeHint into the InStreamFromByteChannel in order to properly test a lazy evaluation of a reasonably sized buffer.

The correct solution, with a test for if the buffer contains the end of the file and lazy allocations to get more data when the data possible will take some time as more analysis of the code is needed.

However, a similar problem exists in the UNICODE / ICU IBM internationalization libraries with their buffer allocations.  Also, the code in fillCharBufferUntilDelimiterOrEnd and fillCharBufferWithPatternMatch (sub-projects/core/src/daffodil/grammar/Parser.scala) are 90% similar and so code reuse and consolidation would be a goal of the allocation cleanups.