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Ferocity allows a creature to remain conscious and continue to fight when he is in negative HP. When you your non-lethal damage exceeds your current HP you fall unconscious. If I have a character with Ferocity and he is at negative HP but not dead he remains awake. But if his non-lethal damage is greater than his HP he is knocked out. It seems strange that a character who can take a full hit with the edge of a sword is knocked out being hit with the flat of the sword.
Is there any rules on how ferocity interacts with non-lethal damage?
The easiest way to understand this is to look at HP as a number line. You know, like school kids do in elementary school when they're first learning about negative numbers.
See this wiki article for an example.
So plot out the character's HP on the positive side of the number line. Note that the 0 value is S for staggered, all negative values between 0 and -CON (not inclusive) are dying, and death happens at -CON.
This is easy enough to visualize, but here it is for a fighter with 12 HP and a CON of 14:
< -14 -13 -12 -11 -10 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 D S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 >
That is his normal number line.
Now if that fighter takes 4 HP of non-lethal damage, it simply moves those position of the S (staggered) indicator 4 spaces to the right:
< -14 -13 -12 -11 -10 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 D 0 1 2 3 S 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 >
And now fill in all the gap between D (dying) and S (staggered) with U (Unconscious):
< -14 -13 -12 -11 -10 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 D U U U U S 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 >
And this is what it looks like for a normal guy without Ferocity. In order to apply Orc Ferocity, simply treat everything to the left of S (Staggered) as Disabled instead of Unconscious or Dying.
Now, I'm not quite sure that this is RAW, but I'm very sure it's RAI - If not, then we have no answer for the awkward scenario of ignoring the sword's edge but being knocked out by the sword's flat-side.