IP Addresses and Services Configuration Guide for Cisco 8000 Series Routers, IOS XR Releases

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IP Addresses and Services Configuration Guide for Cisco 8000 Series Routers, IOS XR Releases

Local station MAC addresses for routers

Updated: August 12, 2026

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Describes how a router-wide local station MAC address supports static ARP and dynamic ARP packets received across router interfaces on supported routers.

A local station MAC address for a router is a configured MAC address that

  • represents the router for local station processing

  • can be added for static ARP and dynamic ARP packets received on all router interfaces, and

  • is configured at the router level using the hw-module local-station-mac command..

Table 1. Feature History Table

Feature Name

Release Information

Feature Description

Local Station MAC Address for Router

Release 25.1.1

Introduced in this release on: Fixed Systems (8700 [ASIC: K100], 8010 [ASIC: A100])(select variants only*)

This feature is supported on:

  • 8712-MOD-M

  • 8011-4G24Y4H-I

Local Station MAC Address for Router

Release 24.4.1

Introduced in this release on: Fixed Systems (8200 [ASIC: P100], 8700 [ASIC: P100])(select variants only*); Modular Systems (8800 [LC ASIC: P100])(select variants only*)

*This feature is supported on:

  • 8212-48FH-M

  • 8711-32FH-M

  • 88-LC1-36EH

  • 88-LC1-12TH24FH-E

  • 88-LC1-52Y8H-EM

Local Station MAC Address for Router

Release 7.9.1

Local Station MAC Address is the MAC address for the router that applies to all interfaces, including VRFs. You can configure Local Station MAC Address for a router using the hw-module local-station-mac command.

This feature allows the router and its interfaces to have one network-wide identity and helps in identifying the neighboring devices in the network while using static ARP.

The feature introduces these changes:

Reduced static ARP entries with system-wide MAC addresses

When a router receives Layer 3 traffic, the destination MAC address is the MAC address of the router interface that receives the packet.

For dynamic ARP, the router learns the interface MAC address through ARP response exchanges.

For static ARP, the router needs a system-wide MAC address to identify the router. This system-wide MAC address must be available in the static ARP table.

In earlier implementations, the router maintained the MAC address of each interface in the static ARP table. This approach used more router resources because the router had to maintain a pool of static ARP entries for all interfaces. The current implementation uses one static ARP entry for the system.

Restrictions for local station MAC addresses

Local station MAC address support is not available on Cisco Silicon One Q100 ASIC-based routers.

For a list of Cisco 8000 Series hardware using Cisco Silicon One Q100 ASIC, refer Cisco 8000 Series Routers Data Sheet.

Configure local station MAC addresses for routers

Configure a local station MAC address for static ARP and dynamic ARP packets received on all router interfaces.

Procedure

  1. Configure the local station MAC address.

    Example:

    Router# configure
Router(config)# hw-module local-station-mac B03F.C98C.B948
Router(config)# commit

  2. Verify the local station MAC address.

    Example:

    Router# show hw-module local-station-mac
--------------------------------------------------------------
Knob                          Status          Applied   Action         
--------------------------------------------------------------
Local-Station-MAC             Configured      Yes       None