If the gluster instance has terminated its course in a dirty way -- eg. we do
a

  # pgrep gluster | xargs kill -9

(IRL assume a system crash, an OOM situation or a segfault), then when glusterd is started next time, it still shows the gluster volumes "started" -- albeit the gluserfs servers are not running.

Any inconstency in permanently stored state should be detected at startup time, so that if things gets cluttered, then, in lack of a better idea, as a last resort we can go for a full restart of the gluster ecosystem.

In this case, a check of pid files against volume info file seems to be sufficient.