Comment # 28 on bug 927250 from Dr. Werner Fink

There are three different scenarios, first of all with plymouth which causes
that systems-vconsole-setup is called very early in dracut and with LANG set to
the value in /etc/locale.conf.  During plymouth(d) is running all calls of
systems-vconsole-setup will come (partly) to nothing.

Then we have the case without plymouth (rpm -e plymouth plymouth-dracut &&
mkinitrd).  In this case the systems-vconsole-setup is called later than in
first case and now includes LANG and LC_CTYPE from /etc/locale.conf and
/etc/sysconfig/language (see ROOT_USES_LANG case "ctype").  My guess is that
now dracut has included /etc/sysconfig/language and therefore LC_CTYPE is set
as well.

The last case is the udev rule /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/90-vconsole.rules with the
line

  ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="graphics", KERNEL=="fbcon",
RUN+="/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-vconsole-setup"

which changes also the virtual consoles and is only in action if no plymouth is
active as otherwise systems-vconsole-setup will come (partly) to nothing.

Without plymouth the last case does set UTF8 even with LANG=POSIX in
/etc/locale.conf and ROOT_USES_LANG not set in /etc/sysconfig/language.

That is that  all three calls uses different an environment respectively the
locale due to the function is_locale_utf8() from systemd-210/src/shared/util.c
or systemd-git/src/basic/locale-util.c