realtek 8192 usb dongle?

[Tom Horsley]

I've foolishly gotten it into my head to try and
get this thing to work as an access point:

Bus 002 Device 006: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. 

On windows XP, it uses the driver named RTL8192cu

One problem is that I have no idea what the relationship
is between the mac80211 driver that hostapd apparently
needs to use and the actual driver for the low level
device, so I don't know how to guess if the 8192 driver
ought to be playing nice with it.

There is source code on realtek's web site for a linux
driver which seems to work, and has lots of source
code bits that speak of master mode and access point
behavior, but hostapd doesn't seem to like it (or
maybe I'm not using the right magic handshake).

Meanwhile, there is also a usb 8192 driver in the
linux staging tree which also contains code
that talks about master mode, but it also seems
not to work with hostapd (even after I add the
usb ID to the table it contains).

Can anyone point me in some direction that might
provide some hints on getting this to work? Do
I need extra stuff in the kernel that I'll missing
on fedora 14 with the 2.6.35 kernel it has?