freevec.org

We tackle the 4x4 matrix inversion using the matrix partitioning method, as described in the "Numerical Recipes in C" book (2nd ed., though I guess it will be similar in the 3rd edition). Using the AltiVec SIMD unit, we achieve almost 300% increase in performance, making the routine the fastest -at least known to us, matrix inversion method!

After a little search I did on Google to find how to detect AltiVec runtime in Linux (I used keywords such as runtime altivec detection and similar), I found that there is no single nice article anywhere that describes something so simple. Thankfully, I got a few good answers from benh and dwmw2 in #mklinux/FreeNode, and I decided to put these down in a cleaned up form.