Comment 47 for bug 1047384

I can confirm there is a bug in 17.10. It's probably another bug but has the same symptom: LUKS passphrase is prompted in qwerty and not with user defined keymap.

This is a "new" bug in 17.10, it worked in previous release.

A workaround is to copy /etc/console-setup/cached_UTF-8_del.kmap.gz (or similar) to /etc/console-setup/cached.kmap.gz and running update-initramfs -u

To reproduce this issue, do a *fresh* install of artful from server ISO (desktop not tested, maybe also affected), configure the keyboard layout to non-qwerty during install and use encrypted disk.
During boot, when prompted for luks passphrase the keyboard is in qwerty. If the user can enter its passphrase on a qwerty keyboard, the keymap is the correct one in the console. The issue seems to be only during initramfs.

I got the idea to copy cached.kmap.gz from Debian bug https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=619711

From my understanding this bug is a mismatch between the behavior of console-setup and initramfs-tools.
On Debian this seems fixed by hooks/keymap from initramfs-tools (not present in Ubuntu package).

On Ubuntu it seems still expected that /etc/console-setup/cached.kmap.gz is generated but it's no longer the case since artful:

$ debdiff console-setup_1.142ubuntu5.dsc console-setup_1.166ubuntu7.dsc:
[...]
- cached=/etc/console-setup/cached$VARIANT.kmap.gz
+ cached=/etc/console-setup/cached_${CHARMAP}_$backspace$VARIANT.kmap.gz
[...]