What does Manjaro do for the kernel? It appears not to be the RPi OS kernel config as the Manjaro kernel supports LVM2 and F2FS. Will Manjaro be aggressive switching to 5.10 (or making it available in the repos)? Or will it wait until the RPI Foundation adopts it? Sorry, too new to know the answer to this already.
It is the RPi tree. I start with the RPi’s tree with their make “bcm2711_defconfig” as a base and add things people have requested here. Just to name a few, file systems, satellite/terrestrial tuners, cgroups, anbox and rspamd support, encryption, modules needed for firewall…
I am not in to using the upstream kernel. I did post one here for people to test. The RPi tree is the upstream kernel but it is fine tuned for their devices for performance and supports all of it’s accessories. So yes I will wait until the 5.10-rc hits their repo. That will be usually some where after 3 weeks upstream release it because they have to take the new code/code changes and adapt it to better suit the RPi.
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Not the answer I had hoped for, but a good answer with details. Much appreciated.
Does RPi kernel consist of special kernel patches or simply a kernel configuration?
Edit: And many thanks for a kernel config well done. I make use of your enhanced configuration.
They take the upstream kernel and patch it with their code. They deactivate some upstream modules and add some of theirs in the config. From all appearances over the years it is heavily patched.
Think of the RPi kernel as being the upstream kernel on steroids.
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After messing around a bit with the manjaro-arm-installer, it would seem the kernel used by Manjaro for the RPi, is the RPi Foundation’s kernel source. I was under the mistaken the impression that Manjaro used a generic linux kernel with RPi configs applied. Not having +rpi in the kernel name is what gave me the mistaken impression.
It is not that simple. The Pi foundation heavily patches the upstream kernel and omit things from the upstream defconfig and add things. Some code in the RPi tree does not exist. So using the RPi config on the upstream kernel will sometimes boot but have a ton of errors and other times it just will not boot at all.
The + used in a kernel name is placed there when you compile a kernel using a git clone as a source. It will not be placed there if you download a tarball for the source and compile it.
@Darksky I flubbed a bit on my update yesterday and did not confirm this, but maybe you can. When a new kernel is put into place by an upgrade, are the modifications made to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf honored when the new initramfs is created? As I observed the update, I believe I saw something to the effect of the initramfs being made with “defaults” or maybe it said “presets”… something to that effect anyway. Sorry, I do not recall properly.
Probably a little of all above including mkinitcpio.conf. Content of the .preset it uses:
ALL_config="/etc/mkinitcpio.conf"
ALL_kver="5.9.0-1-MANJARO-ARM"
PRESETS=('default')
#default_config="/etc/mkinitcpio.conf"
default_image="/boot/initramfs-linux.img"
#default_options=""I would imagine linux-rpi4-mainline will be just fine. I was unaware of this package until last evening. I thought that I would have to wait until a LTS kernel >= 5.10 landed.
VC4 video and F2FS improvements, 5.10 looks to be my holy grail… at least until the next release. 
Im currently testing 5.9 kernel with rp4 and kms is working great already. Glmark2 did 100fps with fkms and 120fps with kms. I can already use hw acceleration in chromium, but not video decoding in hw. What features are you expecting from 5.10 in VC4 video improvements? HW accelerated video decoding?
I am looking for all accelerated video improvements. Currently vc4-3d does not perform well enough for me at 4k, so I am falling back to the fbdev-turbo-git driver which performs better when using Xfce4. Interestingly, with fbdev-turbo, performance is improved with the Xfce4 compositor turned on.
I am working toward building an RPi image to place a healthy number of RPi as production desktop units, to replace our aging thin clients. So X11 desktop performance at 4k is very important for me, but not so much for video decoding, but it would be a nice plus.
And I am hoping that F2FS proves to extend the life or at least reduce some of the SD failures.
Is there a reason the RPi team haven’t mainlined their kernel patches?
I have no clue but I am guessing the have several reasons.
We are in the process of testing it.
Lots of changes for ARM in 5.10, so most of our patches don’t apply anymore. Have to redo a lot of them. 
@Strit and I messed around with the upstream kernel and it does ok but the vc4 addition messed with the sound so it does not work but it now is able to use the upstream device .dtb. The vc4 is already in the RPi tree though. They submitted the patch to upstream so guessing something else needs to be done upstream with their code.
[ray@pi4 ~]$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 0: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA]
Subdevices: 7/7
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
Subdevice #2: subdevice #2
Subdevice #3: subdevice #3
Subdevice #4: subdevice #4
Subdevice #5: subdevice #5
Subdevice #6: subdevice #6
card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 1: bcm2835 IEC958/HDMI [bcm2835 IEC958/HDMI]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: vc4hdmi0 [vc4-hdmi-0], device 0: MAI PCM vc4-hdmi-hifi-0 [MAI PCM vc4-hdmi-hifi-0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: vc4hdmi1 [vc4-hdmi-1], device 0: MAI PCM vc4-hdmi-hifi-0 [MAI PCM vc4-hdmi-hifi-0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
[ray@pi4 ~]$
[ray@pi4 ~]$ uname -a
Linux pi4 5.10.0-rc1-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Oct 26 15:37:14 CDT 2020 aarch64 GNU/Linux
There is some good news though is that the 5.10-rc1 kernel hit the RPi tree today so I will be compiling it today but today is grocery day and might be later on tonight before I can get it built/tested and pushed; If it compiles with out erroring out. lol
We were hit with an ice storm and are now in a hotel room. Not sure when power will be restored, but I will try it as soon as I can.
I just read over on Phoronix that 5.10 will be an LTS version.
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You’re right : 5.10 LTS
And according to a crystal ball 
it will be released at the end of the year : Prediction
I just installed Kernel 5.10 on Operating System: Manjaro Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 5.20.80
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.76.0
Qt Version: 5.15.1
Kernel Version: 5.10.0-1-MANJARO
OS Type: 64-bit
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-4710MQ CPU @ 2.50GHz
Memory: 7.6 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Mesa DRI Intel® HD Graphics 4600
looking all functionality.