MAC purge is used to clear the FIBs of any learned information for a particular MAC address. This allows an operator to perform a controlled OAM test without learning induced by customer packets. In addition to clearing the FIB of a particular MAC address, the purge can also indicate to the control plane not to allow further learning from customer packets. This allows the FIB to be clean and be populated only via a MAC populate request.
MAC purge follows the same flooding mechanism as the MAC populate. A UDP/IP version of this command is also available that does not follow the forwarding notion of the flooding domain, but rather the control plane behavior of it.