After incorporating routing into carp1 device configuration fw2 booted
with ARP entry for carp1.
I need to test it a little more but that could solve the case.
I don't know how it was working in 5.8.
Yes, that was it. Setting the routing in physical device configuration
(vio1) to non-existant IP address
caused the carp device on top to go into not properly configured device
- the MASTER/SLAVE states were
running fine but the arp entry for CARP IP was not in the arp table.
Thank you guys for you time and effort helping me.