[kbd] Broken bkeymap

Hi list,

I'm new to the topic of keymaps and everything around it so I hope to
find some help.

For my Gentoo I'm building my own initramfs, but last week I came across
a strange problem: Entering my passphrase for LUKS was not possible. The
layout was broken.
Eventually I found out that the file generated for loadkmap did changed
but I don't know why. The difference can be seen in this screenshot
(just a URL as I don't want to generate huge traffic by attaching the
file):
https://chaos.social/system/media_attachments/files/104/723/346/690/219/791/original/a5fea93d1f356d8d.png

The first thing I noticed is that the number of null bytes changed from
1 to 3 (from 2 bytes to 4 bytes in total).

Can someone help me to understand why it did changed and why my
initramfs (loadkmap via busybox) is unable to process the new file? Are
both versions even valid?

Thanks
Thorben