I verified that the reported symptom does NOT occur with qemu-system-x86_64 and ttyS0 serial console running on an amd64 host. This symptom seems unique to arm(64).
Specifically, I did the following: (1) Start Bullseye d-i Alpha3 amd64 by the following commands: #!/bin/sh ARCH=amd64 IMAGE=`pwd`/qemu-disk-${ARCH}.qcow2 CDROM=`pwd`/debian-bullseye-DI-alpha3-${ARCH}-netinst.iso rm -f $IMAGE qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o compat=1.1 -o lazy_refcounts=on -o preallocation=off $IMAGE 20G cd /var/tmp cp /usr/share/OCMF/OVMF_VARS.fd . qemu-system-x86_64 \ -vga none -display gtk -enable-kvm -machine q35 -cpu host -m 3072 -smp 2\ -net nic,model=virtio -net user -object rng-random,filename=/dev/urandom,id=rng0 \ -device virtio-rng-pci,rng=rng0,id=rng-device0 \ -drive if=virtio,file=${IMAGE},index=0,format=qcow2,discard=unmap,detect-zeroes=unmap,media=disk \ -cdrom ${CDROM} \ -drive if=pflash,format=raw,unit=0,file=/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE.fd,readonly=on \ -drive if=pflash,format=raw,unit=1,file=`pwd`/OVMF_VARS.fd (2) Start the d-i with "console=ttyS0" kernel command line. I was able to use arrow keys without problem with the d-i Alpha 3. Best regards, Ryutaroh Matsumoto