Comment # 24 on bug 927250 from Fabian Vogt

As far as I can see, this is the same issue as bug 857527, which I reported
ages ago. I'll make it a duplicate of this.

I noticed that systemd-vconsole-setup is failing in the initrd, as LANG=POSIX,
somehow. I'm not sure where LANG is set to the wrong value, but it means that
vconsole-setup tries to call loadkeys without -u, resulting in strange error
messages, which I noticed in the journal.
The workaround is quite simple, add
    EnvironmentFile=-/etc/locale.conf
to /usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-vconsole-setup.service and run mkinitrd.
All charset, ncurses and similiar issues are now gone!
The real issue is that systemd-vconsole-setup does not read the locale config
files itself.