I've also experienced the same issues described by Rene.  Up until now I've been applying the patches that entware-ng/optware-ng use which revert the mipsel changes between 1.0.9 and 1.0.10.

Without Rene's patch, or reverting those mipsel commits, Rene's test.c fails to run, and experiences same error's he experiences.
With his patch it is working as expected.

Note: with or without patching, the static "test" binary I make works with qemu on x64_86 machine.  It's only when I run it on the actual mipsel hardware that it fails. So testing with qemu for whatever reason is not an indication in this case of how it will work on the actual hardware.

kernel 2.6.22.19
binutils 2.25.1
gcc 5.3.0
mips32 soft-float

I'm working with routers like entware-ng/optware-ng, so am also stuck on the same kernel they are.  I know entware-ng is using cross-tools-ng for their toolchain.  I am using buildroot for mine.

thanks,
    Lance