A note about the CH341 programmers to anyone who might wander down here in the wild future year of 2024 – I would avoid getting one of the purpose built flash-programmer ones with the fancy ZIF socket – they have a design issue. There’s probably a few different designs for them floating around, but the schematics / reverse engineering from photos I did confirmed that a lot of them power the CH341 chip from USB 5v, which is.. not correct for programming 3.3v flash chips. If you use those, it will send 5v logic into the 3.3v flash, unless you verify for CERTAIN that the CH341 chip is not powered by the 5v from USB. Your chip might make it out alive, but I’d not take the risk.

However, there is a different design of CH341 dongle out there that doesn’t have this problem, because it’s highly configurable by jumpers. It doesn’t look like a flash programmer, it’s just got a 2×8 header with soldered pins, a couple jumpers, a couple 10-pin unsoldered pin headers. I usually see it with a blue PCB. For those, you can use the jumpers to choose where the CH341 chip is powered from, either the USB bus voltage or the regulator onboard the dongle. If you have to use a chip clip anyway to program the BIOS, I’d highly recommend one of those, it’s safer for the chip, though you might have to break out an image of the pinout for SPI flash to make sure everything is connected up correctly. It’s also a more generally useful device IMO, you can use it as a serial adapter and there’s also an out-of-tree kernel module on Github that’s pretty functional for SPI and I2C functionality.

CH341a would be the cheapest of those options: $3 for a programmer with a ZIF socket and little PCB adaptors for the various different footprints or $9 for a kit with a chip clip.

Criminals and corporations? Intel is intel. Government has a legal monopoly on the use of force,and the intelligence agencies have the right to install whatever spyware they want into the communications infrastructure, e.g., CALEA of 1994, or the corporations go out of business and their executives to jail as “criminals”, e.g., Joseph Nacchio. Does Big Brother need to make a profit, as do corporations, or to fear going to jail as a criminal, no matter how criminal the acts of Big Brother may be?

Mint 18 uses systemd for pid1.