Liboil is a collection of functions that often benefit from having special implementations on various architectures or cpus. each function in liboil has several implementations which may perform faster or slower on a given cpu. some implementations use alternate algorithms, some use hand-crafted assembly, and some use special instructions that are only available on certain cpus, such as mmx, sse, or altivec. the fastest implementation is automatically chosen at runtime.

this package contains the liboil shared libraries. it is typically installed automatically when an application or library requires it.