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Sorry for the confusion. I was in part responding to an
off-line discussion I had with Neal Norwitz, to which you
weren't a party. You can ignore my comments about safety and
crashing.

The difference in marshalling Python data to C data for
ioctl(), compared to the many other places where (indeed)
this problem has been solved before, is that almost
everywhere else, we *know* what the data is supposed to
mean.  C has many more data types than Python, and the
choice of how to convert a string, or an int, to C data
depends on what is expected by the receiver of the C data. 
Unfortunately for ioctl we don't know the required C data
type because it's defined by the kernel module that handles
the particular ioctl opcode.  Some of these (like the one
you apparently ran into when porting the pty code to
Solaris) require a null-terminated string; others (like the
classic tty ioctls) require a C structure, which in Python
can be created by using the struct module.  Both return
Python strings.

I tend to agree with your conclusion that we should extend
the buffer to 1025 bytes and not bother null-terminating
non-string data.  Would you like to attempt another patch?