Extracting the installer binary from the release payload takes 10-12s (using an external registry - may be faster with the local registry). The user has to wait for this process to complete between the point where they are ready to install the cluster and the point where they can download the kubeconfig.

In ABI we always know exactly which version of the installer we will need in advance. The assisted-service uses an on-disk cache of installer binaries, so we could pre-populate the cache with the correct installer binary and eliminate the delay for interactive users. (This would also marginally speed up all ABI installations.)

The cached binary is located at /data/install-config-generate/installercache/<release-image>/<binary> in the assisted-service container. The <release-image> appears to be the full pullspec of the release image.

When FIPS is not enabled in the live ISO, the installer binary is openshift-installer, but when FIPS is enabled it is openshift-baremetal-installer. It's probably best to pre-cache both on non-FIPS hosts (and maybe hard-link openshift-baremetal-installer to openshift-installer-fips) as we are likely to miss it if this changes in future.