Over the past few years, multicore systems have become more and more powerful and, thereby, very useful in high-performance computing. However, many applications, such as some linear algebra algorithms, still cannot take full advantage of these systems. This is mainly due to the shortage of optimization techniques dealing with irregular control structures. In particular, the well-known polyhedral model fails to optimize loop nests whose bounds and/or array references are not affine functions. This is more likely to occur when handling sparse matrices in their packed formats. In this paper, we propose to use 2d-packed layouts and simple affine transformations to enable optimization of triangular and banded matrix operations. The benefit of our proposal is shown through an experimental study over a set of linear algebra benchmarks.