Host is my laptop running F41 and libvirt. Earlier I was trying to install Fedora Server from the netinst ISO in a new VM and the install GUI was extremely laggy – multiple seconds up to around a minute to transition from one screen to another. I actually initially thought the VM was constantly locking up until I got distracted by a notification and when I flipped back, the installer had actually gone to the next screen. My laptop itself was responsive throughout.
I tried F41, then F40, and even an old F36 VM I had laying around in my ISO collection – all showed the same behavior. Then I tried the F41 Server full DVD and everything was nice and snappy.
I’m not sure if the issue is my host system’s libvirt, something about Fedora netinst ISOs, or a combination of the two.
This indicates a problem with your network or firewall configuration.
Issues like that can be related to unreliable connectivity, prohibitive or conflicting routes, restrictive firewall rules, DNS with incompatible feature set, etc.
A common cause of such problems are third-party VPN solutions.
I think you’re right, although it still seems like there’s a bona-fide problem. Once I completed the install from the full ISO, I found out I couldn’t download package updates. The solution to that turned out to be switching the libvirt network backend on my host from nftables to iptables and restarting libvirtd.
But IMHO this also indicates a problem with the netinst install process: I wasn’t anywhere near the point where networking should have been needed when the unresponsive interface became a problem. This was happening on things like the initial language-selection screen and setting up partitioning and volumes. There should be no need to be trying to use the network yet at that point (I might not even have networking yet if I need to configure an interface statically, later in the interactive install process), and if there is it should time out quickly and pop up some sort of failure (especially for a netinstall, since broken networking could mean the install is doomed to fail anyway).
I’ll see if the console outputs during install have any useful info about what exactly is hanging up.