Hi Martin,

> On the other hand, I have access to very cheap phones using Infineon
> PMB7880 (C166 + DSP) or MTK (ARM9) chipsets.

Note, that on the market there is much more Mediatek phones based on ARM7 (MT622x) than on ARM9 (MT623x).
I mainly focused on MT623x series of Mediatek SoC, which is based on ARM926EJ-S with MMU support.
My Linux port for this architecture didn't touch L1 at all. I focused first on getting "application" cpu up and running.
This went quite well and then I tried to understand how L1 works.
Writing driver for MT6140 helped me understand basics of baseband part of the phone.
I managed to configure TX path to transfer data on given frequency and after that I had to have DSP running to send "proper" data.
I got stack on DSP part, because I tried first to download firmware from DSP ROM. This didn't work out so far.
Better approach would be to disassemble and understand DSP-ARM API and use it as it is, without firmware changing for now.
Unfortunately I couldn't find time to work on that due to my professional work.
Anyway, all the links are already given in this thread and that's the current status. I described all my findings on OsmocomBB wiki.

@Wolfram: I'll probably submit barebox port with update of Mediatek kernel code to 3.2 kernel version.

BR,
Marcin