MAC purge is used to clear the FDBs of any learned information for a particular MAC address. This allows one to do a controlled OAM test without learning induced by customer packets. In addition to clearing the FDB 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 FDB to be clean, and be populated only via a MAC Populate.
MAC purge follows the same flooding mechanism as the MAC populate.