How can I increase contract memory in pallet-contracts + chain-extension?

Question

I am exposing some external functions to ink! contracts via a chain-extension in pallet-contracts. I am essentially passing a vector of bytes as a parameter to a contract method and directly forwarding it to the chain-extension method that also accepts a vector. The return value is also a vector of bytes that I encode via the SCALE codec when I write it to the environment.

What I am wondering is how I can increase the maximum allowed input/output sizes such that I can pass in/return bigger vectors. As I increase the vectors, at some point I get OutputBufferTooSmall and I can trace it to:

https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/blob/master/frame/contracts/src/wasm/runtime.rs#L614

I tried changing Schedule limits (such as parameter count, memory pages, etc.), but it doesn't have an impact. As far as I see, it is a runtime limitation that is not related to chain-extension (but I might be wrong). How can I increase the sandbox memory size and what is the preferred way of doing so? Maybe via config and not changing code. I couldn't find where the value pointed to by out_len_ptr is set. Any significant side effects of increasing it?

Thank you!

Answer 1

The size of the output buffer is defined by the contract calling the chain extension. It passes a pointer to the length of the buffer in the out_len_ptr parameter. The contracts pallet doesn't enforce any limit on this buffer except for the maximum amount of linear memory a contract can have.

ink! uses 16KiB for this buffer. What you probably want is a way to have this buffer configurable in ink!.

Answer 2

This issue has been resolved in https://github.com/paritytech/ink/pull/1869