kbd 2.2.0 has a known bug regarding the compatiblility to busybox's loadkmap. This bug is fixed with version 2.2.90 or 2.3.0. I've tested version 2.2.90 and it produced a bkeymap which seems to be correct. As currently version 2.2.0 is the latest stable version for gentoo, I would like to suggest adding version 2.2.90 or stabilizing 2.3.0. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. loadkeys -b -u de-latin1 > /tmp/foo Actual Results: The mapping within this file uses 4 bytes, busybox's loadkmap is not able to load it correctly. The keyboard layout will be unusable. Expected Results: bkeymap should use 2 byte Problematic commit: https://github.com/legionus/kbd/commit/a3751c107088884126a4838af32f3a5859c76b33#diff-27dc3ce3b3c4aff938a9a1c51066ab3fR75 Fix: https://github.com/legionus/kbd/commit/c994c7763b390d28ac92223eaa6176a136ad7b58