Starting with Mono version 1.2.1, the Mono JIT supports the new ARM ABI (also called gnueabi or armel). This is the same ABI used by the 2006 OS update of the Nokia 770 and it should be good news for all the people that asked me about having Mono run on their newly-flashed devices.
The changes involved enhancing the JIT to support soft-float targets (this work will also help people porting mono to other embedded architectures without a hardware floating point instruction set) as well as the ARM-specific call convention changes. There was also some hair-pulling involved, since the gcc version provided with scratchbox goes into an infinite loop while compiling the changed mini.c sources when optimizations are enabled, but I'm sure you don't want to know the details...
This was not enough, though, to be able to run Gtk# applications on the Nokia 770. When I first ran a simple Gtk# test app I got a SIGILL inside gtk_init() in a seemlingly simple instruction. Since this happened inside a gcc-compiled binary I had no idea what the JIT could have been doing wrong. Then this morning I noticed that the instructions in gtk_init() were two bytes long: everything became clear again, I needed to implement interworking with Thumb code in the JIT. This required a few changes in how the call instructions are emitted and at callsite patching. The result is that now Mono can P/Invoke shared libraries compiled in Thumb mode (mono itself must still be compiled in ARM mode: this should be easy to fix, but there is no immediate need now for it). Note that this change didn't make it to the mono 1.2.1 release, you'll have to use mono from svn.
As part of this work, I also added an option to mono's configure to disable the compilation of the mcs/ directory, which would require running mono in emulation by qemu inside scratchbox. The new option is --disable-mcs-build. This can also be useful when building the runtime on slow boxes, if the building of the mcs/ dir is not needed (common for embedded environments where the managed assemblies are simply copied from an x86 box).
There are not yet packages ready for the Nokia 770, though I'll provide a rough tarball of binaries soon: the issue is that at least my version of scratchbox has a qemu build that fails to emulate some syscalls used by mono, so it's hard to build packages that require mono or mcs to be run inside scratchbox. I'm told this bug has been fixed in more recent versions, so I'll report how well jitted code runs in qemu when I'll install a new scratchbox. This is not the best way to handle this, though, because even if qemu can emulate everything mono does, it would be very slow and silly to run it that way: we should run mono on the host, just like we run the cross-compiling gcc on the host from inside scratchbox and make it appear as a native compiler. From a quick look at the documentation, it should be possible to build a mono devkit for scratchbox that does exactly this. This would be very nice for building packages like Gtk# that involve both managed assemblies and unmanaged shared libraries (the Gtk# I used for testing required lots of painful switches between scratchbox for compiling with gcc and another terminal for running the C#-based build helper tools and mcs...). So, if anyone has time and skills to develop such a devkit, it will be much appreciated! Alternatively, we could wait for debian packages to be built as part of the debian project's port to armel, which will use armel build boxes.