I am presently using an up-to-date Archlinux on a laptop with an Intel 915 chipset. In the past I have tried KMS succesfully to a certain extent: for example the french letter "é" is not correctly displayed when I type it in console althought it is correctly displayed under X11. Apart from this, all seems to function perfectly. With the same setup in /etc/rc.conf there is no problem to type and display "é" in console if KMS is disabled.
I was thinking this to be a lack of maturity of KMS, but I just tried KMS on a Slackware 13.0 (2.6.29 stock kernel) freshly installed on the same laptop: definitely no problem.
works for me and cyrillics, I've been using KMS since it appeared and have never noticed that UTF-8 did not work ... also, it's the job of the framebuffer console (fbcon module) to display characters on the screen and it has nothing to do with KMS (which only provides the framebuffer). This is from rc.conf LOCALE="mk_MK.utf8" KEYMAP="uk" CONSOLEFONT="cyr-sun16" CONSOLEMAP= USECOLOR="yes" -- damjan