Volumio 4 and the "PSW" button on rpi 5

Help and Support Help
1

On the RPI 5 and some base bords for the CM5 is a button “PSW”.

Obviously this button starts up the Pi from standbye, but if pressed while Volumio is running it seems to shut it down.

What I can find out, is that pressing this button while the sysem is on it initiates a safe gracefull shutdown at OS level.

question: Is this the same as selecting shutdown from the Volumio menu. ie doing all the things that volumio need to shutdown without coruption etc.

2

@nerd

After a fair bit of research Mainly AI results saying A shut down from the PSW button does not quite do what a proper volumio shutdown does.

Can anyone confirm, deny or even explain further.

Capture

3

Hey @M1ck,

PSW vs Volumio menu shutdown

They’re not identical paths, but both are normal, graceful OS shutdowns in typical setups (sync, systemd stopping services, power off).

What differs is Volumio’s own shutdown step: when you use Shutdown in the UI, the backend runs plugin hooks (onVolumioShutdown) before calling systemctl poweroff. In current upstream code, the important one is networkfs: it unmounts NAS/SMB (etc.) shares that Volumio manages.

If you press PSW while the system is on, shutdown is initiated by systemd (same kind of shutdown as poweroff), but that Node.js hook doesn’t run first — the volumio service is just stopped like other services.

So:

  • Not “unsafe” vs menu in the sense of skipping kernel sync - both go through standard shutdown.
  • Yes, there can be a real difference if you rely on NAS mounts: menu shutdown tries to umount those explicitly first; PSW does not run that Volumio-specific step.

If you don’t use NAS mounts, the practical difference is usually small. If you do, menu shutdown is the safer habit until behaviour is aligned (e.g. via a systemd ExecStop or similar - that would be a product/feature discussion).

(This matches how the backend chains onVolumioShutdown → sync → systemctl poweroff in the Volumio codebase.)

Kind Regards,

1 Like
4

Thats great information, thank you.

sort of always thought I’d have to be using the volumio shutdown. Just got to work a solution for a single case button to start from standbye and trigger the correct shutdown method. Hmmmm a small signal relay, com connected to the push button, nc to psw and no to a gpio, powered by the 5v from the usb. That should do it