As pointed out in https://bugs.schedmd.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12376, you can end up compiling Slurm without PMIx even if the PMIx dev package is installed. Some distros also package Slurm compiled without PMIx support. In addition, OpenMPI master (which will become 5.0) removed support for PMI/PMI2: $ ./configure --with-pmi [...] configure: WARNING: Open MPI no longer supports PMI-1 or PMI-2 libraries. configure: WARNING: PMIx is now required. Either the internal version or an configure: WARNING: external version of PMIx may be used, so long as the configure: WARNING: external version is compatible with the PMIx v2.2 configure: WARNING: Standard or higher. Note that cross-version support configure: WARNING: within the OpenPMIx library can be used by this OMPI configure: WARNING: to interact with environments based on other PMIx configure: WARNING: versions. configure: error: Build cannot continue. To avoid Slurm admins from being in the situation where they realize they need to recompile and re-deploy Slurm with PMIx support in order to support OpenMPI 5.x; we suggest that Slurm starts requiring PMIx by default. Users could still opt-out with --without-pmix if they don't intend to use OpenMPI.