Comment 4 for bug 696318

Looking at the libvirt source code, the chowning of the files to root:root rather than your own credentials is not a bug, but a not-yet-implemented feature (marked by the comment '/* XXX record previous ownership */').

Nevertheless, I assume (hope) that level1.img and level2.img do not get chowned to root:root when level3.img was used as the disk image. So long as that is the case, as a workingaround you should be able to initially chown all three files to libvirt-qemu:qemu. After each session is closed libvirt will chown level3.img to root:root, but not touch the other two. On next startup, level1 and level2 are owned by the right user, and level3 will get chowned.

Please reply and let us know if that is not the case.